


The Man Comes Around

by bluesyturtle



Series: Flesh and Blood [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Biblical References, Canonical Character Death, Demon Hannibal, Dreams, Fallen Angel Will, M/M, Past Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2017-12-22 16:51:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 49,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An angel falls in New Orleans while Jack and the team are there to work a case. They take Will Graham in and put him to work, but something is coming for him that's bigger and older than all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ain't No Grave (Gonna Hold This Body Down)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darkenergies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkenergies/gifts).



> _Well, look way down the river, and what do you think I see/I see a band of angels, and they're coming after me/Ain't no grave can hold my body down_

“This seems pretty open and shut, don’t you think? I mean, I love the south in winter, but it’s pretty obvious we’re looking at a series of business-motivated homicides. Why’d they call us out here?” Zeller dusts his hands on his pants after removing his gloves. He straightens out and shrugs when his questions are greeted by silence. He continues, “Jimmy? You got nothing?”

“Nothing’s about right; there’s a pretty disturbing lack of forensic evidence at this scene, in contrast with the one we found last week. We’ve got ritualistic killings here and further down on Annunciation Street going back about a month. If it _were_ open and shut, we probably wouldn’t have these guys,” Price says, primly, gesturing at the four crucified bodies being taken down from their mounts in the doorways throughout the lobby of Hotel St. Marie. “What about this exactly makes you think open and shut?”

“Okay, this crime scene is a bit harder to place, but that last one? The store owner was practically salivating over the bodies. We should interview him again. Jack?”

Jack looks down from the sky to Zeller’s expectant face and sighs. He says, “Going back to Lécuyer without a warrant and without the probable cause to _get_ said warrant is harassment. You know this.” Jack points emphatically at Zeller and pulls out his phone to check the weather forecast. He hadn’t seen anything that morning about a storm, but the deep gray clouds overhead look ready to drop a blizzard down on their heads.

“I would bet money that guy did it,” Zeller mumbles under his breath as two gurneys roll past covered in the standard black body bags. Jack looks up for the last two and orders the rest of the techs still processing the scene to finish up and head to the lab set up on Bartholomew.

Beverly sidles up beside Jack and stuffs her hands in her coat pockets. She asks, “We’re not on a hurricane warning, are we?”

“Not the last I heard,” Jack murmurs, looking around at the storefront windows darkened and closed out for the night. “Doesn’t really look like weather, though, does it?”

“What do you think? Weird celestial event?”

“Nostradamus,” Price announces reverently. “It would be a little late according to cult speculation, but you can’t rush the universe, I guess.”

“You know what it reminds me of, actually?” Zeller angles his head to the side, glances momentarily at the bodies being loaded up in the vans, and declares, “The Second Coming.”

“The Rapture?” Jack muses, watching the layers of sky unfurl like smoke. “I don’t think so; I’m still here.”

“Ha-ha, you’re hysterical—” A flash of lightning disrupts Zeller’s response, and the booming thunder crack forces a full-body jump out of him. Startled, he cries out, “Oh, my God; it is the Rapture!”

“Brian, calm down.” Price steps off the sidewalk and rounds the few parked cars to stand in the middle of the blocked off street. Beverly goes to stand next to him, and Jack joins them to get a better look. The wind whips around the tar black vortex in the deep navy sky and lights through with another bolt of lightning.

“Do you think we should call this in?” Beverly asks uncertainly.

Jack doesn’t answer; he doesn’t have any kind of explanation for what’s happening. A few of the scattered techs wandering out of the hotel stop in their tracks. One of the women runs immediately for her car, crossing herself fearfully as she goes. Jack watches her go and calculates the possible outcomes for a situation such as the one they’re currently facing. Fear can make people panic; make them turn on each other.

He says, using his authoritative voice, “Whatever it is, we need to make sure no one gets hurt.”

“How do you suggest we do that when the thing is— _Christ!_ Who knows what it is? We need to get the hell out of here,” Zeller pleads. He bumps Price’s arm with his and says, “Man, come on.”

“It’s just a storm, Brian. It’ll pass.”

“I have a bad feeling,” Zeller mutters, crossing his arms over his chest. As if to acknowledge his statement, another series of lightning bolts strikes the earth about a mile away, southeast of their location. One current of white-hot electricity fires down from the colorless, amorphous mist. A solid mass shoots through that pulsating livewire like a drop of water trickling down the length of a string.

Jack gets a bad feeling, too; a bad feeling like he isn’t close enough and that if he doesn’t get closer, they’re doomed.

“Beverly, get the car.” He hands her his keys and takes off running down the street. Over his shoulder he yells, to someone, “Bring a shovel.” He runs through the slow-falling snow, chest burning the closer he gets and the more the chilled winter air begins to taste and smell of ash. His feet take him around a bend after a few minutes, and he hears the roll of tires just behind him as he comes to a stop at the edge of a massive crater. Where the force of the object’s fall melted the snow, icicles have formed around the outermost rim of a giant hole in the scorched ground.

He looks out toward the end of the depression in the ground that extends to the frozen banks of the Mississippi River. Beverly shouts behind his shoulder. He only hears it over the ringing in his ears because the slamming car door wakes him out of his daze. He turns his head and looks. Zeller and Price are each tentatively carrying a shovel and staring disbelievingly at the crags surrounding the point of impact where the ground shot up in disagreement.

“This isn’t a good idea,” Jack vaguely hears Zeller saying to Price. He points his shovel at the spectacle just at Jack’s heels. “What are the odds we get radiation poisoning just by standing here?”

“Uh, well…” Price shifts his weight between each foot. “It doesn’t seem to be radiating anything anymore.”

Beverly steps around to Jack’s side and looks down into the crater, stepping that much closer so that she’s within the circle. She stops abruptly and staggers back. She says, “Jack, there’s someone down there.”

“Oh, if this is the Rapture, I am so royally screwed.”

Beverly jumps down into the crater, and Jack’s first thought is to yank her back by both arms. Protective instinct for one of his own taking over, he yells, too loudly, to be fair, “What do you think you’re doing? We don’t know what the hell it was that threw whoever’s down there _down there_.”

“He’s alive, Jack. I saw him moving.” She struggles out of his grasp easily. He hadn’t been trying that hard to detain her. “Stay here if you want, but I’m getting him out.” Beverly challenges him for a moment with her eyes, and Jack reluctantly relents.

She can’t be deterred, so Jack huffs, “Fine, but I take the lead. You stay behind me, you got that?”

Of course she does. She nods once, and Jack takes a flashlight out of his pocket. He steps where Beverly shows him to step so the unevenly decimated earth doesn’t crumble beneath his feet and send him pitching forward onto his face. She asks him, “Do you think we’ll need those shovels?”

“Yeah,” he replies. He reconsiders, not entirely certain where his answers have been coming from. He changes his mind and admits, “I don’t know.”

“Over there.” He follows the long straight line of her arm with the LED beam of his flashlight. It lights over a pale, bluish foot with curled up toes and a twitching ankle attached. He skims up the rest of the shivering, but mostly still figure to land on the face of a squinting, gasping ordinary man. His sooty palms clutch at his elbows, leaving smudgy fingerprints on his arms. A filmy, veiny layer of black covers his shoulders and part of his top half like an exoskeleton. His left leg allows him modesty enough to cover up his identifying sex markers, though his physical traits scream of a male. Beverly calls up to Price and Zeller, “Bring the shovels down here, now!”

Price complies straight away. Jack can see the other man hesitating to move from the spot where Jack stood a few moments ago. He wouldn’t be able to see the man immersed in the broken crevice of earth slowly filling with flakes of cold snow from there.

Beverly hands Jack the shovel and kneels down to the panicking man hyperventilating in his place. She says, soothingly, “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” He chokes down the erratic breaths racking through his chest and stares mutely her for a few long seconds before jerkily nodding his head. “My name is Beverly, and this is Jack. We’re going to get you out of here; we’re going to get you into some warm clothes and figure this out, okay?” The man nods his head frantically in understanding. “Can you tell me your name?”

He shivers audibly and whispers, throat raw and unused, “Mal’ak ha—” He turns his face away from the light as much as he can to wheeze violently. The adrenaline pumping through his body from the fall visibly drains out of him in shuddered waves. Jack kicks the blade of the shovel into the earth beside his leg, and the man exclaims, wordless and terrified. Spasms shake through his terse, quaking body, evident of an obvious, exponential spike in physical pain.

“Hey, hey, look at me. Look at me.” Beverly grabs the man’s attention before Jack continues to work at the packed in dirt and glassy ice trapping the man under. He looks up to see Zeller talking animatedly on the phone. Price clambers down into the crater with them carrying the other shovel. “They’re getting you out. You just watch me.” He nods his compliance but still flinches when the shovels break through the sediment adhered to his body like glass from the touch of the lightning as it struck. “You were telling me your name.”

“Mal’ak ha-mashḥit,” he mumbles. “It’s Mal’ak ha-mashḥit.”

Price turns his head toward Jack and whispers, “Jesus, what language is that, Arabic?”

“Could be, or Hebrew.”

“The ambulance is on its way,” Zeller shouts from his safety on level ground.

“Do we have blankets in the car? Or clothes,” Price shouts back. “We need something to cover him with.”

Zeller looks back to the car and then down into the crater. He says, “There’s a blanket in the trunk. Do you need me to go down there, or…?”

In the way of giving him an out, Price hedges, “We only have the two shovels.”

Beverly whispers something encouraging to the man where she’s crouched at his shoulder. Across from her, Jack and Price gently chisel away at what could be this man’s tomb if he stays for a few minutes longer with how cold the air is; the snow and the light breeze do little to help. Jack’s hands already feel stiff through his gloves, so he can’t imagine how the man feels, so exposed and vulnerable. He hears sirens caterwauling faintly in the distance, probably five minutes away, if that. Jack hands his flashlight off to Zeller as he stumbles down into the pit.

“Oh, my God,” he whispers, taking in the sight and accidentally flashing the man in the eyes the way Jack did. He jerks away from the light and subsequently yanks the lower half of his body out of its temporary prison in the icy dirt and char. A sharp silence befalls the four of them. Only the sounds of the man gasping and whimpering at the cold fills the echo of the crater several feet deeper than gravediggers typically bury caskets.

The singed flaps of translucent membrane that begin at his back bleed steadily and emit a clear, mucous fluid as the appendages quiver feebly. A quiet, pacific moment stutters into disorder as the burnt butterfly wings the size of the man’s entire body sizzle at the frayed tips and slowly burn away as easily and as decadently as a photograph under a cruel flame.

The man moans miserably and grabs Beverly’s arm in his hand as the melted cartilage and skewered bones at his back dissolve into scraps of torn flesh and cinder. He buries his face in his arm and screams, a baying howl that pierces Jack in the center of his being. The shovel in Price’s hand clatters uselessly to the ground, and he twists out of his coat to tuck it around the freed, writhing man’s nearly hypothermic body.

“Help me, help me, help me,” he chants under his breath, lifting a heavy arm over his neck. Beverly lifts his legs, and Zeller and Jack climb out to the surface to lift him out. Zeller walks the lethargic, clumsy man toward the car, and Jack stays behind to help Price and Beverly out of the crater. The sirens are close now. Deciding, Jack says, “Get him into the car.”

“Wait, what?” Zeller stops and turns, barely managing to hold the man upright and keep him decent at the same time. Price hurries to his side and adjusts the coat so it covers the man’s frail, weakened body more appropriately. His head lolls forward onto his chest, and his knees give out beneath him. Price steadies him and rubs the heat trapped in the material into his arms to get the circulation flowing better. Zeller adjusts the weight on his shoulder. “What do you mean? The ambulance is nearly here.”

Jack deadpans, “You want him to stand after what he’s been through?” Zeller ducks his head and with Price’s help, gets the man situated in the backseat of the car with the heat going. To Beverly, he asks, “Did he say anything to you?”

“He said something about a will.”

“Whose will?”

“He just said, ‘his will be done.’ I don’t know, Jack. He was kind of incoherent on account of having plummeted to the earth in a lightning bolt and almost freezing to death.” He looks at her and can’t tell if she’s trying to make a joke. It’s pretty funny if she is; it’s Goddamn hilarious.

“I’m worried what’ll happen to him at the hospital.”

“We’re the police,” she says, shrugging her shoulders with a deceptive air of nonchalance. He doesn’t buy it, but he’s every bit as worn out as she’s trying not to be, so he doesn’t argue. The flashing red and blue lights illuminate the buildings across the street. They’re seconds away. Assertively and reassuringly, she tells him, “If they want to pull something, we have jurisdiction and authority. Don’t worry about him, Jack. He’ll be okay.”

Jack nods once and watches the man curl into himself in the backseat of his rented Sedan. He bumps his head on the window and doesn’t stir; he just soaks up the heat of the car and of Price’s coat wrapped tightly around him. There’s no telling if Price means to keep it after tonight since a completely naked man who rode down to earth on lightning is currently swathed in it. He and Zeller are leaning against the passenger side door, eyes resolutely watching the indigo canvas of the chilly night sky in the French Quarter. Jack looks, too, at all those stars peeking out with the passing of the violent thunderstorm.

He drops his eyes and finds the man in the car staring out at him from behind the back window. Even at a distance, Jack feels like he can see the stars in those wide, blue eyes; like some greater mystery than even that of the way in which he found his way to them lays dormant within that unassuming body that only walked and talked like a human man. He has to be so much more than that to have even survived the last ten minutes of this impossible night as crazy a thought as it is, never mind where he was before the storm brought him.

He asks Beverly, “What did he say his name was?”

“I think Moloch? Uh, or no, it was longer than that. Could have been another language?”

“Maybe.” He watches the lights flicker around the corner at last and waves down the driver before signaling to Zeller to get the man out of the car. A handful of paramedics trickle out the back of the ambulance. A fire truck rounds the corner after them, and a few workers immediately scour the crater for signs of the fire that burned the earth.

A bulky man in the standard EMT uniform announces, “We’re answering a call for a trauma victim?”

Jack waves them over to the car, and Price and Zeller heft the man up and out. Naturally, he objects some at having to go back into the cold, but he follows instructions and lets the paramedics drag him onto a stretcher to wheel him into the ambulance, coat floundering in the wind that’s begun to pick up since the storm that brought him passed through. He panics when they try to stick the oxygen on his face.

“ _Beverly_ ,” he cries out. He strikes out at the paramedic closest to him with the tank, and Jack stands in the path of his feebly kicking legs. Beverly rushes to his side and holds his hand. “I want to go home,” he whispers from behind the oxygen mask when he calms down enough for them to get it over his mouth. “I want to go home, Beverly…” He sinks into the gurney, exhausted, and closes his eyes. His fingers remain limply tied to Beverly’s.

“I’ll ride with him,” she says quietly to no one in general. Her words seem to remind everyone else that they need to move the man and get him into the ambulance.

One of the EMTs staggers back out of the vehicle after loading the unconscious man in to ask Jack, Zeller, and Price collectively if they saw what happened to him. Zeller blurts out, “He got struck by lightning.” He points to the gaping crater that thankfully only a few people have come out to inspect so far. “Lit him up like a Roman candle; we had to dig him out of the snow.”

“Out of the earth’s crust, you mean,” the paramedic says somewhat skeptically. She walks to the jagged curve of the wide but perfectly circular hole in the ground. She turns back around. “Look, if he’s on any drugs, I really need you to tell me. You won’t get into any kind of trouble.”

“He’s not on drugs,” Jack says, pulling out his official tone of voice. He pulls out his credentials and handing her a business card with his name on it, says, “If there are complications at the hospital, you report it to us, you got that? We don’t need his picture circulating in every tabloid magazine before morning as the guy who fell from the sky.”

“Because that would be ridiculous,” Price scoffs, shaking his head. Zeller gives him a look, and they shuffle off toward the car. Jack watches Beverly in the ambulance with the man’s hand held in both of hers; a curious, unreadable expression makes its home on her face.

The paramedic looks over his card, tucks it into her wallet, and asks, “Do you at least know his name?”

“Um, he said…” Jack tries really hard to recall what the man told them but can’t place the foreign syllables in his mind. He can’t draw it out of his memory, but he can’t let the man go nameless and unknown.

_He said, his will be done._

“Sir?”

“Uh, Will. He said it was Will.”

She nods and traipses back to the ambulance and up the ramp. She tells him, “We’re taking him to Interim LSU.”

Jack walks to the sidewalk where a small crowd of people has gathered to gawp at the wreckage just behind him. He waves at them to step back and make way for the ambulance to pass through; while directing foot traffic, he gets out his cell phone and dials ‘7’. It rings twice.

“It was just a lightning storm, ladies and gentlemen. There’s nothing to see here.” Into his phone, he says, “Bowman, we’ve got a situation needs containing at Woldenberg Park. I’ll let you in on the details later. Right now I need a perimeter set up from Dumaine to Canal Street.”

He waves at Zeller to start the car and covers the receiver when he says, “Interim LSU.”

On the other line, Bowman says, astonished, “You’re just down the street. What happened?”

“Just get down here, Lloyd. Bring a unit; we’ve got an audience, and something that you’re just not going to believe until you see it for yourself.”

He hangs up his phone, and Price rolls his window down. Out the window, he asks, “You’re going to stay?”

“Yes.” Jack nods his head, walking alongside them as Price gives Zeller the okay to start driving. Jack clears a path for them through the steadily growing throng of people that the storm had kept indoors for the greater part of the ordeal. “If you can’t find Beverly at the hospital, ask for a man named Will admitted with lesions and being treated for electric shock.”

Price sticks his head farther out the window when Jack falls slightly out of step with them. He repeats, “Will?”

“I couldn’t remember his real name, shoot me.”

Price nods and looks over his shoulder. Jack looks, too. The people are slowly moving in to inspect the disturbed ground. The firefighters now on the scene direct them to stay back.

“We’ll see you there then.”

Jack watches them go and then resumes his post alongside the uniformed firefighters in between the people and the object of their current fascination and awe. He flashes his badge to one of the higher ranked workers, and they cooperate with him fully. He stands stark still with his hands behind his back and waits for Bowman to come with the unit. The black has cleared completely from the sky and left only a deep purplish blue expanse of nightfall and a slew of pale gray clouds of ice and air in its wake.


	2. Daddy Sang Bass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Sassy Science catches up with the mysterious man in the hospital.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _‘Cause singing seems to help a troubled soul/One of these days and it won't be long/I'll rejoin them in a song/I'm gonna join the family circle at the Throne/Oh, no the circle won't be broken/By and by, Lord, by and by_

The nurse holding the clipboard calls the man Will as he drifts in and out of consciousness. Beverly says nothing in contradiction to what Jack probably told the paramedics about the man. It helps to put an easier name to the face, though she won’t call him by it when he wakes up.

“First responders said he got struck by lightning. Did you see it happen?”

“No.” Beverly shakes her head. She averts her eyes when he rolls up the sleeve of the hospital gown to take his blood pressure. The burns have tapered edges like that of foliage or coral; she got a better view of them in the ambulance when the medics opened his coat to check the damage. “We saw the lightning hit, but we were about five minutes out. We found him nearly passed out by the hole in the ground.”

“And he was naked when you found him?”

Beverly looks at him, confused. She says, “He came in wearing a coat.”

“It was a bit small on him is all.” He shrugs and checks the chart before pressing a button on the machine hooked up to _Will’s_ arm.

“He probably stepped outside for a minute to look at the storm.” Beverly holds her ground. There’s no reason anyone in his right mind would have gone buck naked into the snow and winter wind. Whoever this man is, he doesn’t need the extra stress of admittance into the psych ward. He needs something, though she has no idea what it is. He said he wanted to go home. “Is he going to be okay?”

She recalls the angry red marks tracking across his chest and arms where the lightning scarred him. They begin just behind his left ear and extend down the column of his throat in raised grooves. The nurse adjusts the oxygen momentarily and quickly takes down the unconscious man’s pulse, _Will’s_ pulse.

“He has cardiac dysrhythmia and spikes in his blood pressure. There are also strange growths on his back that we’ll screen in the morning for cancer. He’s stable, but he’s also severely dehydrated on top of everything else. He’ll need to stay here at least overnight.”

“I don’t have to give you the talk about how visiting hours don’t apply to me, right?”

“I would prefer it if you didn’t,” the man, Barry, sighs. “My cousin just made detective last year, so I’ve heard it all before. Personally, I think if someone _wants_ to be here with the sick and the dying, there shouldn’t be rules against letting them stay. It’s not like a lot of the ones we get have people who would do that anyway.” He glances at the patient called Will on the bed and then at his roommate on the other side of the room.

“I just want to make sure no one gives him any trouble tonight.”

He nods amiably and digs a business card out of his wallet. “If anyone gives _you_ trouble, tell them to talk to Philant Derouen. I got you, Agent.” Barry winks, flirtatious intent only barely hindered by the unmistakable fatigue brought on from his shift. He retreats soundlessly into the noisy hall.

Beverly watches the shuffling outside the quiet room and listens to the beeping metronome of the machine beside the bed. She rests her elbows on her knees and takes a few deep breaths. So much of what happened tonight goes against practically everything she grew up recognizing as the truth. For instance, people don’t drop out of the sky and live to tell the tale after; people don’t recover instantly from lightning shock if they recover at all; people don’t have wings, though she did see a man in the circus once when she was a girl.

“That man wants to take you out on a date.” She snaps her head up. His eyes are on the ceiling, searching. “He’ll get up the courage tomorrow if you’re still on the premises.”

“You’re awake,” she mumbles, antsy with confusion. Her hand reaches out halfway to the call button on the bed railing and then stops, undecided. “Are you okay?”

He glances at her and then looks in the opposite direction. He says, “Hardly.”

Beverly closes her eyes and mentally kicks herself. She looks over her shoulder and stands to close the door to the hallway. “You fell out of the sky.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

The image of his wings disintegrating before her eyes flashes white hot in her mind. He flinches, his jaw set and his eyes firmly glued to the wall across from his bed. “You were.”

Stubbornly, he says, “I’m not hurt.”

“Something happened to your back,” she hedges. He stiffens infinitesimally and shifts his gaze again to the ceiling. “You don’t owe me an explanation. I just want to understand what happened so I can help you.”

“You can’t help me.” He shakes his head. “I fell _because_ no one can help me; because everything’s finished for me, and this is my punishment.” His eyes ping around the four walls comprising his room. He stops on the patient lying in the bed farthest from the door, causing him to sit up and look around Beverly so he can see the old woman’s face. “Mrs. Dolarhyde; I thought after eight years, the dementia would have…” His eyes track to Beverly’s face, and chagrined, he lies back down.

Beverly’s been in the room since they brought him into the hospital, and he’s been out since he was placed on oxygen. She stands and checks the chart at the foot of the woman’s bed: Eugenia Dolarhyde, dementia. A second stroke three years ago rendered the woman comatose.

“How did you know that?” He sighs and turns onto his side facing away from her. She sits back in the chair by his bed. “That’s mature.”

“He called me Will. Why did he do that?”

“I guess Jack probably couldn’t remember how to say your name.”

“But why did he pick Will?”

“It might’ve been something you said when we were still trying to get you out.”

He sits up again, and she can see a dozen worries festering inside him. “What did I say? Who was listening?”

Beverly holds up her palms to slow him down. “You said for someone’s will to be done.” His mouth falls into a deep frown. “You said you wanted to go home.”

That does it. His nostrils flare once, and his eyes shine, and looking makes Beverly want to curl into herself and cry for him. It’s impossible the amount of pain evident on his face. He tucks his chin into his chest and calmly breathes in and out for at least a minute before slumping forward with his hands on the bed and his head bowed. Beverly waits in awed silence for him to say something but quickly processes the pose and the muttered words under his breath as prayer.

The doorknob turns, and Barry, the nurse from before steps in with Price and Zeller at his heels. They look winded and about as fatigued as Barry must be underneath the cool, professional surface. He stops in his tracks, looks from Beverly to the man sitting up on the bed, and presses a few buttons on his phone.

“Sir?” He approaches the side of the bed and receives no response. To Beverly, he asks, “How long has he been up?”

“Just a few minutes.” She stands and walks over to Price’s side. Zeller is frozen in the doorway, a look of deep concentration on his face.

“Trouble finding the place?” Beverly leans tiredly against the wall. Barry checks Will’s vitals and makes a few corrections on the chart before placing it back on the foot of the bed. He tips Will’s head back, cautiously, and flashes a light across each of his eyes.

“Turns out there were three other patients named Will admitted with lesions and being treated for electric shock tonight.”

“Three?”

“Not including Angel boy here,” Zeller mutters softly, finally leaving his safe place by the exit. “What? We were all thinking it; the wings, the weird name, the fall Evel Knievel wouldn’t have survived.”

“Brian,” Price shushes him. Barry replaces the stethoscope around his neck and turns to face them. Will’s head is still bowed forward and his lips still moving with nearly silent words.

“He’s praying,” he announces.

“I guess it comforts him,” Beverly supplies. She angles her head to the bed on the other side of the room. “He knows Mrs. Dolarhyde.”

“Oh.” Barry’s face lights up. “Wow, isn’t that something? She’s been here almost nine years; poor thing. Never gets any visitors.” He steps into the hallway and waves a tall, dark complected woman into the room. Beverly recognizes her from earlier when they first arrived at the hospital in the ambulance. He gestures at Beverly, Price, and Zeller standing against the wall. “They’re with the police.”

“Do we have cause to put the patient under guarded surveillance?”

“That might be for the best,” Zeller agrees. Beverly jabs him subtly in the ribs.

“No, ma’am; just us.”

“Does he pose any threat to my staff or my patients?”

“All humans pose a threat to other humans,” the man mumbles sleepily from his hunched posture. He straightens out his spine and opens his eyes to address the doctor. “I promise not to actively jeopardize your workplace or those in your charge.”

Dr. Archambault—Beverly scans the woman’s ID before she turns to face her patient—considers him for a moment and then nods her head once. “Well, I appreciate that. Will, is it?” She scours through his chart. She’s obviously worn out, too.

He makes eye contact with Beverly and then nods his head once. “Yes, that’s my name.”

She feels an ugly pang of guilt at the admission but doesn’t correct him. The doctor flips through the rest of the stapled together pages, probably the single file on this man that exists in that form. She asks him, “Do you have a last name, Will?”

He scans the IV bag beside the bed like it’s a spectacular breed of insect he’s never seen before, like it’s something entirely new and fascinating. He pokes at the bandage covering the needle on the back of his hand and winces.

“Graham,” he answers.

Beverly looks at the IV bag, too. She can’t see the writing from where she stands by the wall, but she knows drip rate in IVs is measured in milligrams per minute. She smiles a little bit at the man’s calculating mind. The reply sounded second nature. Dr. Archambault writes it down on the charts. Will Graham has a nice ring to it.

“Mr. Graham, we want you to stay here tonight, and depending on how you fare in the morning, we’ll release you.”

“I understand.”

“These agents requested to stay and keep a watch over him, doctor.”

“Friends of Philant, Barry?”

His dark skin flushes a deep red, and he shakes his head.

“We’re the feds,” Zeller provides.

“Oh, you’re in town for those murders,” Barry says as the doctor quickly takes her leave of the room. Will lies back down with his back to his guests. Zeller is talking with his trademark air of camaraderie that usually means he’s ready to talk up a storm, so Beverly shepherds them out of the room into the hall. Price hangs back with Beverly at the door.

“He didn’t wake up with amnesia, did he?”

“No, but I don’t think he’s in the mood for conversation just yet.”

“That’s understandable.” He sighs. “We’ll be out in the lobby by the vending machines. You want me to bring you anything back?”

“Something with chocolate that isn’t a Twix.” She reaches into her coat for her wallet, and Price puts his hands up for her to stop.

“I can spot you a dollar, Bev. It’s not a big deal.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

He goes, and Beverly closes the door. When she turns to go back into the room, Will is looking over his shoulder at her. Rather than turn around, he stays where he is and waits for her to round the foot of the bed and sit back in her chair. They’re in each other’s lines of vision again, and Will doesn’t look away. She chides herself for constantly referring to him as Will in her head. He averts his eyes.

“Mal’ak ha-mashḥit,” he says quietly, helpfully. She watches him, stunned.

Rather than ask how in the hell he knew what she was thinking, she repeats the name slowly. “Mal’ak ha-mashḥit.” He nods his head. “How do you spell that?” He spells it for her and silently acquiesces to letting her write it out on an old receipt she digs out of her wallet. He sits up.

“There’s a diacritic underneath the second h.” He points with his finger just short of touching the receipt. Beverly smiles at his poorly hidden enthusiasm.

In a teasing manner, she asks, “How do you get a name like that?”

“My Father gave it to me.” She stares at the serious expression on his face, smile quivering and stretching that much more. His eyes widen slightly, and he ducks his head. “How did you acquire your name?”

“You mean you don’t already know?”

He looks back at her shyly. His head tilts to the side in a vague gesture that says, _Well, okay, sort of._

“Let’s hear it then,” she suggests, only feeling a little bit playful. She carefully folds the receipt and tucks it into a separate compartment of her wallet behind her ID for safekeeping.

“It was your paternal grandmother’s name. Your mother picked your middle name, Haneul. Your father wishes he had let her name you. Your youngest sister’s name, Hyun Ji; he wishes it had been yours.” He pauses and drops his eyes. “He’s very proud of you, your father.”

Beverly stares for a long time and opens her mouth to say something, but once there, all the words she had thought to say dry up on her tongue. She shakes her head minutely in disbelief.

“I’d say that’s impossible, but only so many impossible things can happen before everything seems possible.”

“It’s a better premise to live by.” Will fiddles with the blanket and sighs, rubbing at his forehead. “Your friend referred to me as Angel boy.”

“Zeller cracks jokes when he feels out of his league.”

Someone knocks gently on the door outside, and Price comes in after poking his head into the room. She waves him in, and he walks around the bed.

“Kit Kat for the lady.” He stands there awkwardly for a moment and then turns to Will.

 _Mal’ak ha-mashḥit,_ she corrects herself.

“I don’t know if you’re hungry, but this stuff has phenethylamine in it.” Price waves a Snickers bar vaguely and sets it on the bed. “Here’s some gum, too; it’ll last you a little longer if you go for this and finish it.” Price straightens out and nods his head. Beverly notices he doesn’t attempt eye contact and probably would miss the smile on the man’s face altogether if he hadn’t stopped him with two genuine words of gratitude.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Price stammers. He pushes his hands into his pockets. “The cafeteria’s not open this time of night, but we’ll get you some better food for you in the morning.”

“I appreciate it, James.”

“Call me Price, please.” He blushes, and Beverly wishes Brian was in the room to tease him for it. “Um, I mean, I’m Price. It’s nice to meet you.” He extends his hand.

“Yes, it is. You can call me Will.” Beverly looks at him, astonished again that he chooses not to give his proper name. He returns her glance, holding Price’s hand in both of his as if it were a small animal and not something attached to Price’s arm. “I don’t mind. It seems fitting to have a different name here.”

Price stares at their conjoined hands, disconcerted. The door opens, and Zeller stomps in all talked out. “Jimmy, what, did you get lost? Oh, are we singing Kumbaya?” He grins at Price’s hand still held in between both of Will’s.

“Just a candy run; don’t be jealous, Brian.”

Beverly snorts, tears open the Kit Kat, and watches the show. Will releases Price’s hand and turns his attention to Zeller.

“I frighten you.”

Zeller’s poker face doesn’t waver; it’s pretty impressive. “I’ve met scarier guys who didn’t cannonball into the earth from outer space.”

“Is that where you think I came from?” Will smirks and picks up the Snickers Price left on the bed. He pinches one edge of the wrapper with both hands and pulls too hard on both corners. The chocolate shoots out of the torn wrapper and flops onto the bed in between his feet. Will examines the wrapper, confused and reverent for the ripped cellophane. He looks up at Zeller. “Outer space.”

“The spirit in the sky, you know.” Zeller has his eyes on the forgotten chocolate bar. “That’s home for you, isn’t it?”

“It was,” Will murmurs, setting the wrapper down in favor of examining the candy that came from it. He observes the way Beverly eats the Kit Kat and raises the chocolate to his lips. He touches his tongue to it tentatively and licks.

“Have you never had chocolate before?”

Will lowers the candy, mystified, as he rolls the flavor around in his mouth. “Six hundred years ago in Tenochtitlan.” He takes a huge bite, about a third of the bar, and chomps happily, humming his satisfaction. “It didn’t taste like this. You’ve done well with the fruits of the earth.”

“Six hundred…” Price pulls a chair up to the foot of the bed a few feet away from Beverly’s chair. Zeller stands dumbly, blinking.

“Oh, this is wonderful.” Will nods and takes another bite, exercising caution not to devour another too-large portion. He waves the remaining nub of chocolate at Price. “The phenethylamine was a good idea. It’s very soothing. I understand why you refer to it as the love drug. The Mayans called it the food of the gods.” He swallows and goes to eat the last of it before stopping himself. He sits straighter and eyes Zeller who still hasn’t sat down.

“You’re an angel.”

“Not anymore.” Will shakes his head. “I fell, remember?”

Price leans forward in his chair and opens his package of gummy worms. “Why did you fall?”

“Hang on,” Zeller protests. He drags a chair over from the other side of Mrs. Dolarhyde’s bed and plants it next to Price’s. Will casts his eyes on the woman again and a crestfallen expression crosses his face. “Okay, okay. How did you fall, Mal’ak ha-mashḥit?”

Beverly and Price freeze and look at Zeller. He looks back, confused. “What, did I get it wrong? I thought that’s what you said.”

“No, you got it. He got it, right?” Price turns to look at Will, and he nods his head yes as he eats the final bit of the Snickers.

“Okay, shoot. How do angels fall?” Will evaluates his hand and pops his middle finger in his mouth. “Actually, an easier question to start with: why trust us with this stuff? How do you know we won’t out you or donate you to science?”

Will asks around his finger, “Out me?” He bites the chocolate on the pad of his thumb. “What does that mean?”

“As in, tell everyone what you are for personal gain.”

“What would you gain from outing me, as you call it?”

“Uh…” Zeller looks at Price for help, and Price shrugs. He offers Zeller a gummy worm. “Well, I don’t really know why people do that kind of thing, but it always happens in movies.” He eats a blue and pink gummy worm. “Did you choose to fall here and for us to find you?”

“It wasn’t my decision, no.” Will taps the package of spearmint gum and fumbles the clear plastic off. Beverly stops him from biting through the aluminum wrapper and instructs him to tear it off before slipping it passed his lips. He chews on the piece three times before swallowing it.

At the same time, the three of them lean forward and say, “Ah—”

He makes a face and says, “That’s a new flavor.”

“You don’t eat it, man.” Zeller takes a package of Skittles out of his coat pocket and pours a few into his mouth.

“What are you meant to do with it then—Oh, it’s the one you chew. I see.” He nods his head and tries another piece. Under his breath, he murmurs, “So many things you’ve got.”

“Zeller has a point, though.” Price uncrosses his legs in his chair. “Why would you trust us so quickly? You don’t even have to be here right now if you don’t want to be, but you’re letting us talk to you. Why?”

“I know you three so well already. I’ve known you since you were children and many years before even that.” It explains how he’d known about Mrs. Dolarhyde and about Beverly’s family. “I wasn’t obligated to watch you, but I never could stick to orders; part of my downfall.” He furrows his eye brows and opens another piece of gum. “If you’ll excuse the pun.”

Price smiles and eats a gummy worm. “You’re excused.”

Beverly trashes her empty Kit Kat wrapper and lifts the waste bin to the bed for Will to discard his trash, too. She says, “You’ve got the floor.”

He nods, eats another piece of gum, and says, “I’ll tell you the condensed version.” Zeller and Price look rapt with anticipation. Will wrinkles his nose and scans the room. “Where’s the one called Crawford? He should have been here by now.”

Price says, “Jack stayed to contain the spot where you fell.”

“Why did it need to be contained?”

“Bio hazards and all that; the general public’s going to be curious about it, so we want to make sure no one gets hurt. Contain the situation, get it?” Zeller pours more Skittles into his mouth. “Jack’ll be the last one on the scene if he doesn’t trust the team left in charge.”

Will studies Zeller, then Price, and finally Beverly. He smiles and eats another piece of gum. Around the wad of gum in his mouth, he says, “He left you in charge of watching me.”

“The man’s got good taste,” Beverly says around a smile. Will locks eyes with her and smiles, too, before lowering his eyes. His jaw works at the gum in his mouth.

“Yes, he does.” Will nods. “Okay, well…I suppose it really began in Mexico the first time my Father sent me down. That wasn’t the cause for my fall, though; it was more of an ironic foreshadowing of tonight.” His eyes darken on an unspoken memory. He clears his throat. “I was cast out, specifically, because of a young Lithuanian girl many years ago who was killed in the snow. I’m what your biblical literature refers to as the destroying angel; overseer of the Passover when the Egyptian firstborn was slain, the warrior holding the sword against Sennacherib’s Assyrians, the hiccup in a strand of DNA that causes the rapid division of cells in a body and the onslaught of cancerous tumors.” He frowns and looks toward the door.

“What was so special about the girl?”

Will leans over the side of the bed and spits the glob of masticated gum into the waste bin lined up with his pillow. He frowns and tests the empty space in his mouth. Melancholically, he says, “What became of her brother.” He stares at his hands on the blanket and turns them over to study his palms. “ _Who_ her brother became.”

He runs a hand through his hair. The wounded flesh on the underside of his arm stands out vibrantly on his pale skin. Zeller drops his eyes, and Price studies his gummy worms. Beverly hugs herself and tries to relax into the seat.

“My Father sent me for many children in those days, when the Berlin Wall was in its novelty. Those were some of the last days I walked in His favor.” He sighs and rubs at the inside of his wrist where one long burn stretches around to the scaphoid bone. He presses his thumb to the red skin and watches it turn white and back to its scarlet tint. “The family in Lithuania was touched by Death; I knew for many years what would happen to them, and I had never reconciled it. My problem has always been that I feel too much; that I empathize too readily.”

He pauses and looks again to the door. A few moments of silence tick through the room before the door opens, and Jack walks in, unassisted.

“Will’s telling us how he fell,” Zeller says over Price’s gummy worms.

“Pull up a chair.” Price pours some of Zeller’s Skittles into his hand, and they switch back.

“Oh, what the hell,” Jack mutters blearily. He crosses the room and gets the remaining chair on the other side of Mrs. Dolarhyde’s bed. He drags it back against the wall and sits with his head leaned back.

Beverly leans forward in her chair. “You were saying about the Lithuanian family.”

“Yes.” Will hums, closing his eyes in thought. “The Lithuanian family and their surviving son. It was a dark time, desperate. Oppression is a silent war that makes victims of all those it touches. Death is often the way you measure it; my hands were the scales for thousands of years.” He shakes his head.

“I’m not supposed to watch you live your lives. Knowing who you are only makes it harder when your time comes, but I had watched this family anyway against my Father’s advisement and had come to care for the little girl and her brother. He valued her life above all things, and I had scarcely seen a love that precious in the world in all my years keeping watch over mankind. I wished to see them grow old together, but this, of course, was not the plan.”

“Sorry, whose plan?” Jack opens the Reese’s Zeller hands him.

Zeller answers for Will, “The Big Kahuna in the sky. He’s an angel.”

Jack looks at everyone in the room and finally brings his eyes back to Will. “Yeah, all right, I’m listening.”

Will smiles and opens another piece of gum, but he looks less than happy. Beverly can tell there is something bittersweet about the memory. He doesn’t acknowledge it. He just begins to speak. “It was the year 1973.”


	3. Southern Accents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will explains how he fell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _For just a minute there I was dreaming/For just a minute it was all so real/For just a minute she was standing there/With me_

“That seems likes quite a while to you, forty years. You weren’t born yet.” He smiles at Zeller and Katz. To Jack and Price, he says, “You were only children.”

Zeller eats his skittles and asks, “Has it taken you forty years to fall then?”

“It took forty years for the decision to be made, though I think I sealed my fate that day when the girl died.” Will ducks his head and idly touches the clear sheath around the package of gum. He licks his lips. “She was murdered, you see.”

As soon as the words leave the man’s lips, Zeller’s sure he actually can see it. He hears Katz suck in a surprised breath right as his arms prickle with a fantastical cold from the day dream. He shivers and risks saying, “I’m not the only one hallucinating right now, am I?”

“Oh, thank God,” Price mutters.

“Sorry.” The image drops like a projected film fading out into obscurity. Will shakes his head. “It’s been a while since anyone asked me to tell a story. I get carried away with the reconstruction.”

Jack asks, “Wait, you were doing that?”

Examining his hands and his arms, Will marvels, “It seems I haven’t deteriorated all the way just yet.”

“What happens when you deteriorate all the way?” Katz leans forward in her chair, tilting her head to study him, too.

“I’ll be just like you.”

Zeller doesn’t think he imagines the mournful note in Will’s admission, but no one comments on it, so he doesn’t either. He’d like to ask just what exactly he can do now, but it doesn’t feel like a good idea. Will brings his eyes up to Zeller’s face and watches him as if to either dare or acknowledge his previous train of thought. He doesn’t have any evidence to suggest whether that’s possible or not, but he doesn’t doubt it could be true.

“You wouldn’t be able to do any of the weird angel stuff you can do now?”

“None of it.” Will shakes his head. “It will fade with time; if I were to abstain from tapping into it, it would still wane and eventually run out.”

“How long do you have before that happens?”

“It could be years,” Will murmurs. He turns his hands to assess the creases in his palm and how they change when he curls his fingers. “It could be tomorrow.” He flexes his hand and sighs. “My wings were…the price I paid to continue living. Their loss is both a statement and a punishment.”

Will looks at Jack before he even opens his mouth to speak. “A statement of what?”

“Dishonor,” he whispers. “Infamy.”

“And punishment for the Lithuanian girl, whatever happened to her?” Price mumbles over the gummy worm he’s been holding since Will inadvertently broadcast his memory to the four of them. Zeller reaches over and taps his wrist, alerting Price of its existence. He catches Will smiling a very tiny smile and peeking up at them from beneath two curled locks of dark hair.

“It was punishment for the boy.” Will drops his eyes and draws lines up and down the inside of his arm to trace the veins. “His sister’s death…” He swallows. “I need to tell you the full story.”

“Before we get started, this dinner comes with a movie, right?” Price gestures with his bag of gummy worms. Zeller sticks his hand in and pulls out a red and yellow one. Price barely spares him a glance, too busy watching Will. “Just so we know to be ready for it?”

“I can repress that element, if it would make you feel more comfortable. It only feels natural to show you, to let you see it as I do.”

Price considers the offer. Zeller can see Jack and Katz considering it, too, but Will’s eyes are trained on him.

Zeller takes a breath and lets it go, slowly. “Well, I’m in.”

“Yeah,” Katz agrees, wary but not reluctant or hesitant in her response. Price surrenders his consent, and Jack nods his head. Will smiles wider, looking actually happy to be given this small permission to be himself. It makes Zeller’s heart feel big in his chest, like it doesn’t fit or like it never did but this strange sadness only woke him up to the reality of it.

“It’s all right that you call me Will, by the way,” he says to Zeller, snapping him out of his reverie. “I know it’s been bothering you, all of you.” He glances significantly at Katz and then lowers his gaze to his hand again. He’s taken to drawing patterns on the palm of his hand and down the length of each finger. He takes a deep breath. “Forty years ago, there was darkness over Europe; you called it the Iron Curtain.

“There had been attempts in those days to flee the Eastern Bloc. Some were highly creative and commendable; hijacked aircrafts in mid-air, for example. It’s been done to excess now, of course, and it wasn’t incredibly original, but the spectacle of it…” Will nods his head distractedly. Pictures of abrupt engine fires and metallic explosions flicker dimly across the foot of the bed where Zeller has been staring blankly. He jolts upright and blinks the image away. Will is staring at him with a mildly embarrassed expression on his face.

“Right, sorry. Go on.”

“The stolen aircrafts brought many casualties, as you can imagine. In times of unrest, my plate never emptied. I never had much time anyway to consider what exactly I was doing in carrying out simple orders. One of the crashes resulted in the deaths of the girl’s family; all perished but she and her brother, and this was not a mercy done to them in any way, shape, or form.” He pauses, eyes darting across the thin blanket, and swallows. “Some men found them, deserters, of a sort; they came to take shelter in the cabin where the girl and her brother stayed after their parents’ deaths.

“They were well-equipped for a time, but resources ran low, and they feared for their lives and freedom should they abandon the safe haven they found. It was a harsh winter; not enough game left in the woods to feed the six of them and the two children.

“You can imagine what solution they came to as the cold dragged on and the animals died off or moved on. They knew they would die if they stayed any longer without food, and they were set on staying.”

The room chills around them, and Zeller notes with panic and relief that the others are equally affected. He tries to make himself relax, but the nervous energy is a part of the memory. Uproarious singing carries through the insistent, biting breeze like that of drunks at a bar. Everything is too intensely white for any of the images seen to be exactly clear or distinguishable, but terrified screaming can be heard beneath the cacophony of wind and lyrics shouted in a foreign language that might be German but could be anything.

Something swings through the screen of white like a pendulum. The dull, wet thud ends the singing, but the screams continue and become increasingly manic and feral. A softer thud sinks into the soft white snow, blood spouting onto the snow and onto the clearer shapes of men standing around the little girl. Her brother wails, distant and unseen. One of the six men drops the axe and removes his glasses to wipe at the blood.

A horrible dread blurs the next few moments before Zeller finds himself staring at the red sheen of blood smeared on the walls of a bathtub not big enough to fit anyone but a small child. Zeller can make out a few golden strands of hair sticking along the sides. He gags at the smell in his nose, rich and meaty but also coppery with the strong presence of salt.

A boy licks the tub clean, _the_ boy; he growls hungrily as he eats. Ruddy brown broth dribbles down under the collar of his shirt. A few hairs adhere to his chin. Zeller’s stomach is hollow and full at the same time. He’s disgusted and humiliated and horrified, but he’s alive, and maybe because what’s happened can’t be undone, it’s the only thing that matters.

The pictures, odors, and flavors slowly recede, and vaguely, Zeller registers the presence of yet another person in the room. There’s an awful metallic taste in his mouth; he bit something bloody.

He makes himself open his eyes and sees the nurse from earlier taking Will’s blood pressure again and writing down in his chart. Will is sitting upright in exact same position he’s been in since Zeller came back into the room to retrieve Price. He and the nurse speak for a moment about something Zeller can’t hear but that looks pretty casual. The nurse, Barry, he thinks, steals a glance at Katz. Will gently shakes his head; Barry doesn’t see.

“It’s good that you’ve got company,” he hears the guy saying as if through a door or a wall. “You’ve got all those tests to do tomorrow. They’ll help keep your spirits up.”

“Keep my spirits up,” Will repeats doubtfully. He glances at Zeller, and his expression doesn’t change, though his eyes look a little bit devious. Returning his eyes to the nurse, who doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that Zeller is awake—everyone else is asleep, disturbingly—Will says, “Thank you for your kindness and attentiveness.”

“Oh, well, no problem, Mr. Graham. It’s no problem. I’m here to get you better, you know.” Barry ducks out of the room, flustered but grinning from a simple expression of thanks that he must not get very often. Will turns back to Zeller.

Quietly, he says, “You’re awake.”

“Yeah, apparently.” He scans the room. Jack’s head is tipped back onto the wall behind him, Price’s chin is tucked into his chest, and Katz is slouched over both arms where they’re folded precariously over the teeny armrest. Distrustfully, because he can’t help himself, Zeller asks him, “Did you knock us out or something?”

A wrinkle knits its way onto Will’s brow. “Of course I didn’t. It would be within my power, for now, but no, I didn’t.”

“So we just all happened to pass out at once?”

“It’s three o’ clock in the morning, Brian.” Zeller stops short and checks his watch, indignant. “Oh.”

“The last time I checked facts most life forms require sleep to function.”

“You don’t?”

“It doesn’t seem to be very important at the moment. I might be…too troubled.”

Zeller stares briefly at Jack’s slack mouth and sleeping face. He looks deceptively harmless in this state. “Stories don’t make you tired?”

“Not when they’re mine.” Will shrugs easily, wincing slightly as he rolls his shoulders.

“How’s your back?” Will is just as taken back by his inquiry as Zeller is. He feels the need to clarify, inarticulately. “I mean, because it looked really…um, when they melted like that, it must have been painful.”

Will swallows hard, but his face doesn’t change. His eyes do, somehow. Zeller can’t really name the hard glint that’s arisen to the shiny surface of those lucid blue eyes. It’s not hostile, but it is dangerous. Zeller swears softly and looks away.

“Forget I asked.”

He shifts in his seat, careful about how much his clothes rustle. It would really be a mercy to wake everyone up and get them back to the motel so they can sleep properly and not wake up stuck in the positions they fell asleep in, but Zeller keeps quiet. He stays quiet enough that he can hear the nearly silent noise Will makes in the back of his throat just before he sighs.

“It _was_ painful,” Will murmurs. “I’ve only been with flesh one other time before, and I’ve never experienced anything so…” He shudders delicately and chews on his lip.

“So Tenochtitlan was it for you.” Will glances up to meet his eyes, dimly surprised that Zeller remembers, but there’s no way he would have forgotten. Sarcastically but not unkindly, he adds, “I was taking notes.” Will cracks a small smile, and Zeller claims it for a win. “Why were you sent down that time? What was different that you got to go back?”

“I was meant to eradicate a demon inhabiting a Mayan woman.”

“A demon,” Zeller repeats blandly. He says the word again and rolls it around on his tongue. “Okay, not weird at all; makes perfect sense. What happened with her?”

“Him, actually; Ose,” Will corrects shyly. “He breached the barriers between this world and hell in the form of a leopard and eventually assumed the shape of a man. He entered into Tenochtitlan unrecognized and nightly claimed a new face. He was almost impossible to track.”

He starts to do that thing again, transferring bits of his sensory memories along with every recollection. The shift into it is more gradual than it was the previous times it happened, so it’s easier to adapt to; it helps that it isn’t a memory of violence but of exuberant life and something unrecognizable that comes closest to ecstasy.

Zeller tastes bitter but smooth cacao on the inside of his lip and on the roof of his mouth as if he’s just had a long drink of hot liquefied chocolate. A humid breeze combs through his hair and whispers against his skin, warm and inviting. Zeller blinks once, and the sensations that come with the scenery crumble away. Will apologizes, legitimately sorry as far as Zeller can tell.

“Oh, no, that was…it was interesting.” He laughs, too loudly, and Price stirs beside him in his chair, slowly waking up. “Crap.”

“We could probably afford to wait until a more suitable hour,” Will admits, though he clearly doesn’t want or need to wait. He tells Price when he goes to rub at his eyes, “I didn’t knock you out; you fell asleep.”

Zeller bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing again and quickly catches the gummy worms before they fall off Price’s lap and onto the floor. He shakes his head groggily and then more persistently. It dawns on Zeller that he’s probably still got the moving cannibal picture show fresh in his mind. Price confirms his theory when he mutters, “That was intense.” Price checks his watch and then looks at Zeller, Katz, Will, and then Jack in that order. “It’s almost four in the morning.”

“Yeah,” Zeller yawns. Regretfully, he adds, “We’ve got bodies in the morgue, too.”

With Price waking up, Zeller’s forgotten to use his inside voice and subsequently woken Katz and Jack in succession. Jack groans and stretches his arms overhead before checking his watch and frowning.

“We should head out.” He stands blearily to his feet, the Reese’s wrappers falling off his knees to the floor. He stares at them pointedly and then puts the heels of his hands over his eyes. He sinks back into his chair and reaches tiredly for his trash. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never been roofied, but this is probably what it feels like waking up after.”

Will opens his mouth to protest, but Zeller beats him to it, trying to be helpful. “It’s not because he knocked us out.”

Jack peers at him from behind one hand and then at Will. Some kind of awareness trickles onto his face. He stands, more steadily this time but still obviously exhausted. He approaches Will’s bedside, looks him right in the eye, and says, not accusingly, “You’re an angel of death.”

A moment of silence skips through the room, and Zeller exchanges glances with Price and Katz both, unsure of how to react.

Will smiles serenely. “That was my calling.”

“So you know death; you can see it and imagine it.”

Will’s voice is almost musical when he replies, “Vividly.”

Jack nods, contemplatively licks his lips, and sets his hands on his hips. He says, “Maybe it still is your calling.” At Will’s widened eyes, he continues, “We’re hunting a serial killer here in NOLA. We’ve got no leads, one possible suspect, and no real evidence to do anything about it. Do you think, if I put you out there, you could see something, anything, and point us in the right direction?”

All eyes descend upon Will’s shaken expression. This is the first time since he conked out under the oxygen that Will’s looked even minutely afraid.

“You want me to look into the faces of the dead?”

“I want you to help me catch the ones who made them that way.”

Will swallows and turns to look at Katz. She opens her mouth to speak but doesn’t right away. Will gives her the time she needs, and she says, “If it doesn’t feel right, you don’t have to do it.”

He watches her for a few moments longer and fumbles with his hospital bracelet. Looking at no one, he asks, “Would I be helping people?”

“In a way that not many people are able to,” Jack affirms. Katz gives him a sharp look that Jack acknowledges and then disregards in favor of watching Will. “Who knows how many lives we would save if we had you on our side.”

“Jack,” Katz interrupts. “We don’t know what he can do yet or if this is too much to ask.”

“I’d like to do it,” Will says, voice soft but firm. “Jack’s right; death will always be my calling. I’m here now, so I might as well use it in a positive way.” He nods once at Jack, almost dismissively, and turns to look at Katz. “I appreciate your concern, but perhaps I was cast out to repent for the millions of lives I’ve taken; maybe I was thrown _here_ so you would find me and put me to work.”

“I’m not suggesting a permanent arrangement, yet,” Jack says, more to Katz than to Will, though they both turn their attention on him. “We’ll see how this case goes; if I think having you around helps, maybe we can see about something more official.”

Jack backtracks to the chair for his coat with an air of finality about his strut that suggests they should all stand and get ready to leave. Zeller has no qualms about it; he wants to nab as many hours of sleep, horizontally, as he can before he gets called back to South Broad Street. Katz stays where she is. Jack glances in her direction, and she shakes her head. She means to stay through the night. Jack doesn’t question her decision. Zeller keeps his mouth shut, too.

Over his shoulder to Will, he says, “I’ll come back later today with a copy of the case file, and we can look at it together.”

“Not necessary,” Will calls back before he can exit the room. Price and Zeller, walking in tow, also stop in their tracks. “I know there’s a stigma against eavesdropping, but I overhead you speaking with Barry in the hall about it; _La Croix Tueur_ , the locals have been calling him.” Zeller marvels momentarily at the perfect accent and pronunciation of the man’s French. Before he can ask, Will says, “I learn fairly quickly.”

Jack ignores the latter half of what Will has just said. “What do you mean, it’s not necessary?”

“He crucifies his victims in the establishments where they work. You suspect Lécuyer, but you can’t prove anything. I’m caught up.”

Jack walks back into the room, and only the low whirring of the machines at the comatose woman’s bedside fills the room until he speaks. “Well, what do you think?”

“All I can tell you right now is Lécuyer probably didn’t do it, but it’s not enough to look at photos. I need to be where he killed them; I need to see the bodies.”

He mulls it over in his head, considering the possibilities and whether he’s made the right choice in asking for Will’s help, even if he does seem cooperative enough. He sighs.

“The doctors are going to run tests on you tomorrow; you clear those, and we’ll see about getting you in the field. This is only a trial run, though. You got that?” Will nods yes. Jack straightens out. “If there are any problems with your release, I’ll deal with it.”

He turns to go and leaves the door open for Price and Zeller to follow. He looks over his shoulder at Katz and says to Will, “Tell her what you were going to tell me about Tenochtitlan.”

Katz looks too worn out to hear a full-fledged fairy tale the likes of which Will could dish out if given half the chance, but the last one served to lull them all to sleep. He figures if a horror story could do that, then a happier story would do the trick just as well. Will smiles at Zeller and then turns to face the confused expression on Katz’s face. He pulls the door shut before he can hear what he says to her.

“What about Tenochtitlan?” Price asks him.

“There was a demon-leopard that kept possessing people, and—you know, that indie movie that got released a few years ago? Maybe it was Danish or something?” He trails off once the pair of weary nurses passes them by. The blonde raises an eyebrow at him, and he tries for his best charming smile. It must just go to show how tired he is because she keeps on walking and doesn’t look back.

“It might be best not to talk about it here,” Jack rumbles, voice gravelly with the need for sleep. They leave the hospital without incident and without exchanging any more words on the matter. Zeller tosses Jack the keys to the Sedan and takes the ones to the Nissan Jack drove from Hotel St. Marie.

He and Price load into the car and navigate through the dark, slick streets. Price yawns and rubs at his forehead.

“It must be unbearable, knowing that he’s going to lose it someday.”

“He’ll still have his memory,” Zeller says with a shrug. “He just won’t be able to share it with other people anymore.”

“It must be lonely.”

Zeller kills the engine in the parking lot of the crowded motel. The bulk of the FBI agents in town for the murders are checked in here, making for a pretty incredible boom in the owner’s revenue for this month. Price doesn’t get out of the car right away; just sits. Zeller looks at him.

He asks, “Do you think that’s really why he fell here, to help us?”

“I don’t know if there’s a reason for it. He’s pretty lucky the way I see it, even if it wasn’t _preordained_.”

Price leans his head out the window and watches the sky for a moment. Zeller looks, too. The sky has brightened slightly since they’ve been indoors; the previous black has taken on an inky cerulean. When he cranes his neck and looks straight up, he can make out the faint outline of the Milky Way; the gray vine twists up from over the horizon. There are too many lights on in the city, but the darkness from the new moon does help the barely visible streak of light to stand out, if only slightly.

Price says, sounding farther away than he is, “I suppose there are worse ways he could have been reintroduced to humankind. Good morning, Brian.”

“Oh, definitely,” he mutters.

Price slides out of the car and makes for his room. Zeller waits a while longer with his head out the window, favoring this quiet moment to stare up at the sky. Another car pulls up on the other side of the lot, and Jack walks passed him on his way to his room. He must have stopped by the crater to make sure everything was secured before heading back.

“You’re going to hate yourself if you fall asleep like that,” he warns, unlocking his door. Zeller grumblingly sits upright, closes the windows, and exits the car. “Try to get some sleep.”

“Yeah, you, too, Jack.”

He locks the doors with the remote and drags himself up to the second story rooms, managing to take his shoes off before he collapses into bed fully dressed with the sheets still tucked in under the mattress. Faintly, the memory of a jungle canopy and a sleek dark night flits into the first semblances of his dream. He sees a woman whose face morphs and shifts at every transition from night to day. Her eyes glow a beautiful maroon, and when she puts her hands in his hair, everything cuts to black. It’s the most soothing reprieve Zeller’s had since coming to Louisiana.

He sinks into the blankets and sleeps with a familiar but unknown warmth in his chest and in his belly.

_Him, actually; Ose._


	4. I See A Darkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will looks at the case for all of five minutes while noshing on French toast and wishing it was chocolate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Well, you know I have a love, a love for everyone I know/And you know I have a drive to live, I won't let go/But can you see this opposition comes rising up sometimes/That it's dreadful imposition, comes blacking in my mind/And that I see a darkness_

Price returns to the hospital early, early and finds Beverly swaying by the coffee maker down the hall from Will’s room. He approaches slowly and waits for her to put the cup down before making his presence known.

“How was Tenochtitlan?”

“Green,” she says, sounding somewhat surprised and not as sleepy as she looks. A quiet yawn makes its way out of her, but then that declaration of exhaustion passes, and she looks fine again. “He did that thing, and I think I dreamt about it; really weird.” She shakes her head and questioningly holds the instant coffee out to him. He extends one of two cups he bought at Café Du Monde toward her, and she stares at it uncomprehendingly for a moment before taking it, grateful and relieved. “My hero.”

“I figured you’d probably need it, sleeping here last night. Did he keep you up very long?”

“No, but I think that was the point. He knew I needed to be on my feet today.” She sips the coffee, sighs, and adds, “I actually feel pretty good. I mean, I’m tired but not I-slept-in-a-hospital-last-night tired.”

He nods. “Did Will have something to do with that?”

“It _was_ a pretty good dream.”

“Oh,” Price says tonelessly. She looks at him.

“Not that kind of dream.” He raises his hands to concede the point and dumps the lukewarm coffee she made for herself before he got there. She sighs. “They gave him some kind of barbiturates about an hour ago so they could get at his, um…” She looks around. “They wanted to look at his back.”

“It still hurts him?”

“Just when people try to touch them; I think it’s at least partially psychosomatic. He’s battling with a lot of guilt about everything, and when people prod at the place where _they_ used to be, it must feel terrible.”

“So he’s out?”

“They’re doing a biopsy.”

A few nurses rush by, following the page for an incoming patient at the ER; they hear the name, Verger, and relax.

“I worried that might be Will,” Beverly confesses in a tiny voice. It’s unlike her, the nerves.

“He’ll be all right, Bev. He weathered worse than a few tissue samples last night.”

“They shouldn’t be poking him like some kind of animal.”

“They’re just trying to figure out if those things on his back are cancerous and if they need to be removed.” He overlooks the slight shiver the thought sends through her. “They could be cancerous for all we know. It could be a good thing that they’re dissecting what’s left of them.”

A familiar voice calls around the corner, “Agent?”

Beverly snaps out of her daze and peeks around the wall dividing their little niche from the hallway, and the nurse from last night comes walking over. He waves once in acknowledgement, and Price waves back politely.

“How’s he doing?”

“Well, he’s sedated,” he hedges, rocking back on his heels. “It looks like he probably had some kind of at-home surgical procedure to get rid of two localized chondromas in his shoulder blades. From what we can tell, they’re benign. Oh, that’s a cartilage tumor, by the way; a chondroma.” Beverly nods patiently, and Price drinks his coffee. “Maybe they weren’t before whoever got to him hacked whatever else was left off, but they are now; benign, I mean.”

Beverly asks, “No infections or pneumonia from the cold; anything?”

Barry, Price reads his nametag, says, “Clean bill of health, as far as we’ve looked into it.”

“What about blood cultures?” Price jumps in before Beverly can get her next question lined up. “Are you going to do a brain scan?”

“He’s only here for electric shock and abrasions. We don’t really have the resources to do full body exams on every inpatient we get through here.” It looks as though he can probably say a bit more on the subject, but Beverly interjects before he can get started.

“So we can check him out sometime today?”

He bites his lip. “When he wakes up, the doctor’ll ask him some general questions. I’m not supposed to give a heads up about these kinds of things, but Archambault wants to get a psych eval for him.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Beverly says, frowning. “We’re FBI. We can have one of our own evaluate him.”

“I’ll remind her of it. I’m off in about half an hour anyway.” A bed rolls into Will’s shared room, and Price steps out into the hallway. “Oh, Agent Katz?” He looks over his shoulder and judges from the expression on Barry’s face that whatever he has to say to her, it is definitely not for Price’s ears, too. He walks along, unbothered, to Will’s room, and finds a nurse fixing the pillow beneath Will’s head. The man himself has been put back on oxygen and yet another intravenous solution that turns out to be morphine, at a pretty high drip rate.

“Christ, the sedatives weren’t enough?”

“He kept waking up,” the blonde nurse shrugs her petite shoulders beneath a bright blue pair of scrubs. “You should’ve heard him howling and shrieking.”

“It was that bad?”

She looks up at him, not entirely sympathetic but wholly remorseful anyway. “He made it seem like we were hacking off his arm just by touching those…I guess we’re calling them growths, but—do you know this man?” She tilts her head to the side curiously, straightening out the bed sheet as she stands up taller. “I mean, do you know what the hell happened to him?”

“I just met him last night after that storm, up by Woldenberg Park.”

Recognition flashes coolly in her bright blue eyes. “You’re one of the cops working the case,” she surmises, though it isn’t a question the way she phrases it. “I thought you weren’t from around here. Where’s home?”

“Virginia. Well, Stafford, but you know.”

“You get to go to all manner of exotic places then, I guess?”

He chuckles self-deprecatingly. “Oh, yeah, we go all across the continental U.S., as long as someone’s been murdered first and a different branch of the FBI doesn’t claim jurisdiction. I’m Jimmy, by the way.”

“Saskia,” she says. He shakes her hand, and her grip is strong enough to be painful, if she tried. Following his train of thought, she explains, helpfully, “I grew up on a farm.”

“Around here?”

“Ogden.”

The slight variation in her accent makes more sense with the added context. He visited David and his wife in Syracuse last spring; he had never been so reluctant to come home. Granted, he never liked to leave his brother behind, even if David was older by eight minutes and hated to be babied.

“It’s beautiful up there in the summer.” Price walks around to the seat by Will’s bed where Beverly must have fallen asleep last night. He sits down. “Do you go back home a lot?”

“Not since I left for college; hard to do much of anything when you’ve got people holding you back.”

“Those usually aren’t the relationships we need to be holding onto in the first place,” he mumbles, scanning Will’s sleeping face with his eyes. He tries to find any sign that he might come out of it soon, but he carries on, unchanged.

“He’ll be a while,” she says softly, crossing to the woman’s bed a few feet off from Will’s. “They gave him enough to tranquilize a horse.”

The door opens, and Beverly walks in, looking more worn out than she did before Price left her alone with Barry.

He asks, hesitantly, “Everything all right?”

“Yeah, fine.” She pulls up a chair and sits at the foot of Will’s bed.

“He asked you out, didn’t he?”

“In a roundabout way.”

He hides his laugh behind a cough, pretty unsuccessfully judging by the look she gives him. “Jack will probably need us back at the station before noon.” He anticipates what she will say next. “Why don’t you go, and I’ll stay so he won’t be alone when he wakes up?”

“Would you? Jack will probably get on you.”

“He has my preliminary report. Unless we get another body tonight, he doesn’t need me. He does need you, though, so scoot.” She laughs, spares a glance for Will, and then nods.

“Thanks for the coffee, Jimmy.”

“No problem. Now get out of here.” He smiles and settles into his chair as Beverly leaves, almost forgetting completely about the other person in the room apart from the two unconscious patients. He turns to see Saskia wrapping something up in a cloth and tucking it into one pocket. “What is that, voodoo?”

“Barry calls it conjure.” A wrinkle settles onto her brow. “I don’t support it, and it’s not regulation, but he has a lot of faith in it. Actually, I think he could get into trouble if Archambault found out.”

“What is it?”

She sighs, “He calls it a mojo bag. There’s supposed to be a doctor in town who makes them for specific cases.”

“Interesting; do they ever work?”

“For Mrs. Dolarhyde; not lately, but I guess that depends on how you look at it. While I’d hardly call this living, she is still alive. That ought to count for something at least.”

Curiosity peaking, he asks, “What sorts of things can you heal with a mojo bag?”

Saskia, of course, has no idea how to answer his questions about this type of thing. She shrugs, looking way out of her element, the poor woman. “Barry might still be around; he’d probably be happy to tell you more about it.” He registers now the awkward way she holds the parcel in her pocket away from her body.

“Oh, I didn’t realize this stuff made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry.”

“I’m used to it by now, more or less.” She huffs a laugh. “Living in New Orleans for the better part of ten years will do that to a person, even to a country girl like me. I should be back on my rounds now, though.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“I’ll be by to check on him in a few hours. Hopefully he’ll be up by then.”

“Um, hey, if I’m not here for whatever reason when you get back, could you call this number?” He fiddles a card with his name on it out of his wallet. “The second number is my cell. I just want to be sure that someone’s here with him when he comes back.”

She takes his card and scans the type. For a moment he worries he’s given her something embarrassing like that one baby picture of him eating spaghetti naked and smashing a meatball into David’s hair. She reads, “Jimmy Price, Forensics and Technology Expert of Behavioral Science Unit, Quantico, VA.”

“It’s a twenty minute drive.”

“Well, color me impressed, an expert,” she muses, not sarcastically. He can hear a faint slant in her words that doesn’t exactly pair with the rural countryside.

“Where did you go to college, if you don’t mind my asking? Your accent is giving me mixed signals.”

She blushes, an utterly perplexing, and adorable, physiological response, and says, “Cornell and then Columbia.” He would like to ask how she ended up in Louisiana after so many years living in different parts of New York, but she’s already checking her watch and ducking out of the room. “I’ll give you a ring if he wakes and you’re not here.”

“Thanks, Saskia.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She’s gone, and it’s just Price, Will, and Mrs. Dolarhyde. The machines whir and beep around them. Will shifts on the bed.

“She’s very comforted by your presence. You remind her of her father.”

Price jumps and brings his eyes from the comatose woman lying in the other bed to Will, who is pushing himself, with much difficulty, to a sitting position. Price stands abruptly to help him sit up and to readjust the pillows. “How are you awake? She said they tranquilized you.”

“I’ve been awake this whole time,” he mutters bitterly. “I was waiting for her to go so they wouldn’t touch me anymore; too many people touching me, it’s a nuisance.” He pauses and lets Price gently push him back to lean on the cloth pillow behind his head. He eyes Price until he sits down again. Slurring slightly, he says, suspiciously, “You were thinking about getting me a sachet, weren’t you?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Price lifts one eyebrow carefully.

“When she said they used enough to subdue a horse, that wasn’t a euphemism. Everything’s…sort of…fuzzed.”

“How can it be having other physical effects if it didn’t work to keep you under?”

“Secobarbital isn’t a sleep aid,” Will says, sounding a touch annoyed but perhaps only as a result of the way his head must be spinning. He closes his eyes and presses the heel of one hand to his forehead. “It’s an anxiolytic and an anesthetic. It…sedates.”

“That lisp is quite becoming on you,” Price teases delicately. Will squints at him and then drops his head tiredly.

“Just give me the phenethylamine and end my suffering.”

Price grins and hands off the Snickers hidden away in his jacket pocket. Will tears open the wrapper in a slightly more organized fashion than he had the night before and immediately takes a huge bite out of it, chomping happily as he goes. A fleck of chocolate dots the line between pink lip and peachy skin.

“I know I said I’d get you real food, but you’ve had a rough night. This is the only thing I know for sure that you like.”

“Jack will break the fast with us.”

“You mean he’ll bring breakfast.”

“That’s what I said,” he mumbles around another bite of chocolate. “This _is_ sufficient, but you will need better sustenance.” He waves the remaining half of the chocolate bar vaguely at Price. He blinks and scrubs at his eyes with his free hand. “Lots of spots.”

“Do you think you’ll need glasses?”

“A better question: will they give me glasses?”

“Have you performed an eye exam yet? Barry said they only do the basics for typical inpatients, but I think the eye test is routine for newbies.”

“I’m the newbie in this scenario?”

“Yes, you would be the newbie in this scenario.”

Will nods and flings the ripped cellophane over the railing into the trash bin beside his bed. Price laces his fingers over his stomach. “Would a sachet work on you?”

“What was it you called it initially, a ‘mojo bag’?” Will smirks, amused. “Life here would suit me, I think. Even among the sick, there’s a magic in the atmosphere. To answer your question, earthly charms work as well as the practitioner and his subject believe they work.”

“Can you believe in anything earthly or charming?”

“It’s been thousands of years.” Will shrugs easily and devours the last of the chocolate. He moans delightedly as he chews. When his mouth is no longer full, he says, “It’s as if you took everything you were given so long ago and magnified it all to the point where it’s almost an entirely new substance altogether. Oh, wonderful. This is…” He closes his lips around his thumb to eat the melted chocolate leftover on his skin. Dreamily and with glossy eyes, he declares, “I am a fan of this.”

“You’re incredibly stoned right now, aren’t you?”

“It’s entirely possible.” Will turns sharply to look at the door right as it opens. “He brings the breakfast, at last.”

Jack walks in and discreetly closes the door behind him. Price smells the telltale fragrance of pancakes and baked pecans. He salivates a little and snaps his mouth shut to stop himself.

“I had a feeling you might be up. There’s food for you in here, too.” He points at Will with his finger. Will furrows his eyebrows.

“I appreciate it, Jack, but—”

“Do you want the johnnycakes or the French toast? I already started eating the eggs Benedict.” He thrusts the bag at Will’s chest, and Will takes it, confused and squinting. “Jesus, how much of that stuff have they given you today?” Jack looks pointedly at the morphine drip.

When Will doesn’t answer, Price takes the floor for him. “He went in for a shoulder biopsy. They gave him, Seconal, was it?”

Will makes a gesture with his hand that probably means, _Something like that, yep._

“They doped you up, is that what you’re saying to me?”

“Doped up, stoned; you have so many ways to talk about this pleasant euphoria.” He shakes his head, smiling faintly.

“He’s lisping. Do you hear that?” Jack steps around the bed to look more closely at Will.

“I had noticed that, yes,” Price affirms lightly. “Sort of takes twenty years off him, doesn’t it?”

Jack sighs. “I can’t have you out on the field like this, Will.”

“Just show me the pictures.” Will reaches nonspecifically for the satchel on Jack’s shoulder. “I know you brought them. Give.”

Testing him, Jack says, “You told me before it wouldn’t be enough to look at the pictures.”

“Hello, my name is Will Graham, officially, and I’m a human being with one of these things.” He pounds gently on his chest with a closed fist. “And sometimes I lie when the promise of escape looms overhead.”

“You lied to me.”

“Yes, I did. Give.”

Jack holds the satchel out of Will’s reach. “I’m the guy you don’t lie to, Will. I’m the guy you trust. You do that, and I’ll return the favor. I’ll cover you as much as you need me to. You got it?”

“No, because you won’t _give it to me_.” Will clutches at the satchel, too loosely to be considered a serious attempt at snatching it from Jack. He huffs, frustrated and worn out from the short burst of effort it took him to do that much. “I only lied about that one part because I _do_ trust you, Jack Crawford. I _know_ you better than you know yourself. If I’m useful in this one capacity, and you don’t actually need to go through the extra motions of getting me out of this cage to use me for your games, then you won’t go through the extra motions to get me out of here.

“And do you have any idea what it’s like to be trapped in here, to this confinement? Can you imagine what it must feel like; humans plucking and extracting bits and pieces from the most sacred parts of you that remain and talking about your scars like they’re poetry?

“I am being as honest as I can be with you, Jack Crawford.” Will closes his eyes and breathes, dropping his shoulders. Quietly, he says, “Just give me the pictures, please.”

Jack considers everything that has just been said to him, slurred, really, and then hands over the satchel. Will sets the bag from Vacherie down on the tray Price eases across his knees and scoots back to flip through the photographs. Price sets the Styrofoam container of johnnycakes in his lap and digs in, desensitized already to these particular crime scene photos. Will distractedly eats the French toast when Jack places it in front of him.

Less enthusiastically than he ate the Snickers, Will polishes off the syrupy egg battered bread. He gets powdered sugar on his chin and a dusting of it across the curve of one nostril. Price hands him a napkin, and he stares at it.

“For your nose, and um…” Price points at his own chin and Will mimics the action, inadvertently smearing a drop of syrup over the powdered sugar. “Oh, for—no, here, look.” Price finds an unopened bottle of water on the shelf beside Will’s bed and uncaps it before wetting a folded napkin and dabbing at the spot on Will’s chin. “Not very self-aware for a several thousand year-old angel in a grown man’s body, are you?”

“I never picked up the mannerisms, or the niceties.”

“So what do you think, Will?”

“Price has always been an admirable older brother; the only trait he actually lacks in this role is sequential antecedence.”

He feels his face light up, probably because he’s embarrassed but probably also because he’s pleased for the recognition.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jack drawls, giving Price the side eye all the same.

Will closes the Styrofoam lid over the remains of his French toast, of which he didn’t even leave crumbs. “I like chocolate better.”

“You like—Will, no, about the case. What do you think about that case?”

“Oh, well, Lécuyer didn’t do it; I’m sure of it now. Brian will be displeased to hear it.” He shoots Price a look. He turns his eye back on Jack. “Lécuyer is macabre and he enjoys the symbolism employed in these killings, but he’s just a voyeur looking for a show. That you suspected him at all probably equated with the feeling of ‘getting stoned’ for him. He would feel just like this, I imagine.” Will takes his hand down after noticing he’s been holding it up in the air like a lightning rod.

“Who are we looking for?”

“Ah, that’s a different story. See, it’s…complicated.”

“What does that mean?” Price can hear the impatience trickling into Jack’s voice even if Will apparently can’t.

“It’s up in the ether, the things people’s hands have touched. Actions are ripples; you can trace them back to the moment of impact, but you can never know what exactly touched down for certain unless you saw it with your own eyes. I can’t trace this ripple back to its source, not the way you want me to.”

Before Jack can say something possibly damaging to their working relationship with Will, Price asks, “How can you do it then?”

Will smiles, and in that same tranquil tone he took ownership of his calling as an angel of death, he says, “Reconstructing the architecture of the ripple our killer leaves; it’s like a footprint or like alleles in a chromosome. They’re not unique, not perfectly, but they can be typed and identified and catalogued and _found_. That’s how I help you find the tide bringer, your _Croix Tueur_.”

Price likes Will, he decides, quite impulsively but genuinely.

“I like you, too, Price.” Will smiles lopsidedly with his teeth. His eyes have fogged over considerably more since looking at the photos and getting proper food in his belly.

“I think you need to sleep, buddy. Come on.”

Price takes the Styrofoam container off the movable tray. Jack removes the crime scene photos from his reach.

“I told you; I’m not tired.”

Jack taps gently on his shoulders. “Well, you need to sleep this off anyway. Lie down.”

Price piles the Styrofoam on top of his and Jack’s emptied containers and stands, trying his best to be persuasive so Will listens to them and gets some much needed rest.

“If you’re awake when Saskia comes back, she’ll touch you some more. I know you don’t want that.”

“Oh,” Will mumbles, disheartened. Price regrets his words for a moment and only for a moment. He sighs and lets himself be arranged back on the sturdy mattress. Price refrains from pulling the blanket up around Will’s chin. Something occurs to him as Will squirms in an attempt to get comfortable.

“His doctor wants a psych evaluation; Katz said we would handle it.”

Jack pinches the bridge of his nose. “Did she now?”

Will looks up at him expectantly, and a very evident thought dawns on him.

“Like clockwork,” Price marvels under his breath. Will smiles secretively and scrubs at his eyes again. “Did you say whether you had been given an eye exam yet?”

“It wasn’t among their priorities, I don’t think.”

“I’ll tell Saskia later if she calls me.”

“She will.”

“What?”

“I’m going to talk to Dr. Bloom in Baltimore. Maybe she’ll come out to look at him.”

“Yeah, not maybe; she will, too.” Will sighs and shimmies against the bed sheets, antsy. “You men need to have more confidence in your stations.”

“I think drugs make him prophetic.” Price shrugs. “Do you want to stay and make sure he sleeps, or should I?”

“I’ve got to hold down the fort at the station. You keep these for when he wakes up.” Jack leaves quietly, and Price sits stiffly, trying not to project too much or make a lot of noise.

“Relax,” Will murmurs, shifting again on the bed. “They feel better now.”

Price sits up a little bit straighter. “Sorry?”

“They put this goop and special bandages on them, and it’s…I mean, it doesn’t feel great or anything.” Price leans closer to look, but Will’s eyes are closed. “But I feel okay.”

“Oh.” Price expels a breath he had been holding. He speaks the only coherent truth on his mind. “I’m glad.”

“Thank you, Jimmy.”

“Go to sleep, Will.”

“Yeah, fine.”

He hears what might be a yawn from Will and then silence. It’s comfortable and easy and light. Price removes the gummy worms he bought for himself with Will’s Snickers from his other jacket pocket and starts in on them as he skims through the photos he’ll look over with Will again once he wakes. It’s sort of ironic that the killer they’re chasing with Will has been named The Cross Killer.

Maybe it’s just whimsy that has Price thinking that.

“It is just whimsy.” Will turns on his side so his back is to Price.

There are two scraggly trails of blood zigzagging down each of his shoulder blades. They run at such an angle to each other that they aren’t truly parallel. Price averts his eyes and focuses on his gummy worms. He eats a blue and pink one and waits for the stubbornly wakeful fallen angel to fall asleep already.

He sees Will’s back expand a little bit as if with an intake of breath, but he doesn’t speak. He looks over his shoulder at Price instead, a mild glare warming in his eyes. Price smiles and waits for Will to settle in again before getting comfortable himself.

He doesn’t mind waiting or sitting quietly. He doesn’t mind it at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vacherie is a restaurant in NOLA with a menu that I couldn't actually look at in its entirety because technical problems, but what you need to know is that I don't own it or profit off it or anything crazy like that.


	5. The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alana meets Will in NOLA.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _And the first time ever I lay with you/I felt your heart so close to mine/And I know our joy would fill the earth/And last till the end of time, my love_

“You realize how crazy this sounds, don’t you, Jack?”

“Humor me just for a minute, all right? You trusted my judgment enough to make the trip.”

“I trusted your judgment enough to believe that there is, in fact, a man in the hospital with no identity and no plausible story to explain how he ended up there. I _believe_ that that individual is confused and in need of some serious help right now.”

Flatly, he says, “So you don’t trust my judgment.”

“Jack,” Alana chides. She buries her hands in her pockets to protect them from the cold. “You expect me to believe he’s an angel who fell out of the sky; really?”

“I saw it; the team saw it, too.”

“What exactly did you see?” She pushes through the revolving door at the entrance of the hospital and waits for Jack to step out alongside her. “Did you see him, the man himself, plummet down to earth and create a massive crater around him with the impact of his fall?” He opens his mouth to speak, but she continues: “Or did you see _something_ hit the earth and then _find_ a man at the bottom of the crater?”

Jack falters and shakes his head. He holds his tongue until they get into the elevator, and as soon as the doors slide closed, he turns to her.

“What I _saw_ with my own two eyes was a pair of honest to God wings dissolve off his back the minute they were exposed. And you know what else?” The bell dings at another floor; two nurses and a man with a baby stroller board the lift. Jack huffs, reselecting his words. “You’ll see what he can do.”

Alana isn’t sure what to make of this whole situation. Jack’s never been much for flights of fancy or even small overtures into hyperbole, but this business with fallen angels is impossible.

They ride up two more floors and exit with the man pushing the stroller; he branches left while Jack leads her right.

“If he is what you say he is, why does he need to be here with sick people?”

“Psych eval,” Jack reminds her. “The doctors were worried about his back; growths, they’re calling them.”

“Right,” she says, not antagonistically. He gives her an empty glare and stops outside a closed door, clearly walking on eggshells regardless of whatever her opinion may be. “Why take an interest in him, Jack? Why call me here to talk to him?”

He squares his shoulders, the telltale sign that he is about to give her a pre-thought out answer, but then that confident visage shivers and is replaced by something less certain and more open. He begins, “The night we found him, I swear there was something…there _is_ something in him that needs to be here. I don’t know what it—”

The door opens. Alana smiles at Zeller’s cocky expression.

“The man has a Crawford-detector,” he says with a smirk.

“How fortunate for you,” Jack mumbles, sidestepping him to get into the room. Zeller moves away from the door to let Alana in, and she goes, not sure what all she’s expecting but surprised anyway at the scene she walks in on.

Bloody evidence photos lay strewn about the foot of the bed in a messy fan. Jack had mentioned their current case over the phone, briefly; some bits here and there about crucified corpses and druidic evisceration. She hadn’t seen pictures from the crime scene yet; they’re gory, from her cursory examination. It takes her a moment to figure out why Jack would let this stranger see them, but it only takes a moment: one disapproving, bewildered moment.

“Alana Bloom,” a voice she doesn’t recognize names her in the quiet, beeping room. She looks up from an especially grisly disembowelment with half the entrails still clinging to the red, viscous ridge of skin above a naked man’s hipbone. From beneath a shaggy mess of dark curls, a pair of sharp blue eyes finds her.

“You’re Will Graham?”

“In a manner of speaking, I am.” He shrugs and extends his hand. She takes it and then releases him, narrowing her eyes just so at his innocently questioning expression. He asks, faintly smiling, “You’re not sure about me, are you?”

“That’s hardly a leap,” she says congenially. Jack pulls a chair beside the bed from the wall and waves Zeller toward the door. “Are you going?”

“I thought you might perform the evaluation now while you both have a minute.”

“It’s not like _my_ schedule’s all that packed, Jack.” Will arches his eyebrows, expressive for someone in such a precarious position. He fiddles the photos into a neat stack and hands them off to Jack. He sets them under his arm, and Zeller steps around the edge of the bed to stand at his side. He gestures at a pair of glasses folded up at Will’s knee, dangerously close to being crushed under his leg.

“You’re supposed to wear those, you know.”

“Oh, right.”

Will grudgingly sets them on his face, nudging them so the frames scratch a few times over the bridge of his nose. Alana smiles in spite of herself. He certainly carries himself like he fell out of the sky.

“Should I call you after we’re done here?”

“Please,” Jack says, tipping his head slightly. “No one should bother you; the staff knows you’re here.”

“Thank you, Jack, Zeller.”

Zeller shows Will and then Alana a wide smile before turning and following Jack out the door. Alana shrugs out of her coat and sets it on the back of the chair before sitting. She finds it curious how taken they are with him, though he does have a pleasant air about him like nothing has ever breached the fine, shivering surface of him. Will watches her quietly, sitting perfectly still where he is.

She decides to begin with a simple, low stakes question. “Do you know why Jack called me here to see you?”

“The nurses suspect I hurt myself before. If you give them the instruction, they’ll put me in the screaming ward upstairs.”

“The screaming ward,” she repeats; there is a delicate lift of a question to her words.

“They scream.” Will drops his eyes and then looks to the left at the woman lying in the bed hooked up to steadily beeping machines. “Some of them, it’s all they can do anymore to remember that they’re alive and that they haven’t moved on somewhere else.”

“You’re talking about the patients on suicide watch.”

“Yes.” A chill sweeps over the skin of his forearms, but his body remains unmoved. “If you saw fit to send me there, I guess I would understand.”

She studies him, trying to pick out the accent riding on the undercurrent of his carefully picked sentences. She hears some kind of Southern lilt that could be a result of a regional upbringing in Louisiana or a bordering state. Whatever intonations she hears, he may simply be a mimic; the fact of his drawn out vowels says little about where he could’ve come from.

“No one’s sending you anywhere,” she reassures him, crossing her legs. “We’re just here to talk, Will.”

He nods. “I believe you.”

She can tell that he really does, and for some reason, her heart clenches at the realization.

Giving no sign that she is affected, she asks, “What’s the last thing you remember before meeting Jack and the others?”

He looks between her eyes and purses his lips slightly, thoughtfully. That thoughtful expression, however, appears to be a permanent feature of his face.

“Noise and…” His eyes slip shut, brow furrowing around a thought he takes a moment to assess before voicing it. “No, not noise; it’s more that I remember that there was nothing.” He opens his eyes and stares hard at his hands in his lap, fingers flexing and curling experimentally against his thighs. “For the first time in all my existence, there was nothing; no light, no warmth. There was only this wind everywhere and that rushing feeling you get when you’re falling or when you’re really afraid.”

After a few seconds of silent deliberation, he looks up at her, his curiosity replaced with a staggering amount of guilt. Cold seeps through her chest, a strange, displaced sense of betrayal or abandonment or she doesn’t know.

She swallows.

“You remember falling; do you remember where from?”

He smiles sadly and murmurs, “Would that I didn’t.”

“Why do you say that?” She tilts her head to one side, attempting an objectified professionalism. He doesn’t seem interested in picking apart her approach either way, so she relaxes minutely but only enough not to come across as tense.

“Maybe I would feel better.”

“Are your wounds bothering you?” She glances pointedly at the jagged red stains on his forearms where the lightning scorched and scarred him. Even if the rest is bogus, she can’t help but be endlessly impressed that he’s upright and functioning. A man could fake an identity and by extension, a story, but he couldn’t fake the physical evidence under scrutiny this intensive.

“They’re fine.” He rolls one shoulder slightly. A slight wince twitches onto his lips for all of two seconds before slipping away into hiding again. His face returns to the stoic if mildly bewildered mask it has been since she met him. “From my understanding, they’re supposed to hurt.”

“You’re in a hospital for a reason.” She considers pressing the call button on the side of his bed. “If you feel any discomfort, there are drugs you can take to feel better.”

“That’s not going to make me feel better.” He chuckles mirthlessly and shakes his head. “Corporal suffering is good; this kind is anyway.”

She dissects his words for the meaning, not particularly liking what she takes from them. However, her opinion in that capacity doesn’t matter, so she pushes it away.

“Why do you think you need to suffer?”

He looks up sharply at her, blue eyes wide and shining. She thinks his lip might have quivered once, but her focus hadn’t been anywhere but on the distraught expression so evident and telling in his eyes.

“This life is about suffering, didn’t you know?” He studies her and then looks to his left again at the woman lying comatose on the other side of the room. “I’m _here_ to suffer. I wasn’t…I didn’t deserve not to anymore.” He sighs and glances at her again before readjusting his glasses on his face so that she can’t look into his eyes when he takes his hand away. “You’re still wondering, so I’ll tell you: it hurt like hell, falling that far. If all the ruin I’d caused over the course of my life hadn’t merited it on its own, I would have deserved to fall a hundred times more because of what I did.”

She can’t fault Jack for wanting to believe Will. She can’t fault herself for wanting to believe in this morose, tortured man either. Whatever wrong he had done to earn this pain, it won’t go away no matter how deeply his delusion runs, which apparently is rather deep.

Instead of try to reinforce some sense of truth in him, she expels a soft breath and takes another before speaking: “What did you do, Will?”

A slow smile stretches unsteadily across his mouth; it isn’t meant to reflect happiness. Rather, it is an expression of happiness long since purged. While it isn’t forced in nature, there is something breathtakingly honest and vulnerable behind it that does emit a residual, tragic grief born of loss and longing. She can’t explain to herself how she can pinpoint any of those attributes or tell them apart. Vaguely, she is aware of his speech, but the words are lost in the emotion.

From the flurry of sounds and the dull ache at the pit of her stomach, she hears him say, “I fell in love.”

Blinking darkness from her eyes like wiping away spider webs, she asks him, “Why was that so bad?”

“I fell in love with the wrong person,” he clarifies. “Or well, I was never supposed to do that in the first place. Do you know that the Ancient Greeks had four ways to talk about love?”

Still taking a moment to right herself, she recites from memory, “Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape.”

“Yes.” He nods, pleased but only slightly uplifted. “Agape is what we feel for God, what we should feel for Him, you understand.” She nods back and gives him a small, encouraging smile; it doesn’t feel quite like enabling, so she waits for him to continue. He does, emphatically: “Agape is selfless; it asks for nothing and only acts on that emotional connection, that love. It’s beautiful when it’s real. You have a great capacity to feel it and to share it with others.”

It takes her a moment to get that he doesn’t mean her specifically; _you humans_. 

“If you’ve felt it, is it so hard to believe that others could, too?”

“What I felt wasn’t agape.” He turns serious again as if a switch has been flipped.

“Eros then?”

He outright blushes; the sight leaves Alana torn between amusement and guilt. He opens his mouth, closes it, makes a frustrated noise, and procures a candy bar from beneath his pillow to tear into with gusto. She decides on amusement and waits for him to eat half the Snickers before trying to get him to speak to her again.

Lightly, she says, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of if that is what you felt.”

“Maybe not to you.” He takes another bite of his chocolate. “It was a really big deal at the time.”

“When you were in Tenochtitlan?”

Her question surprises him. His brows knit together and he sets the half-eaten candy bar down to stare at her harder.

“Are you enabling me, Dr. Bloom?”

“We’re just talking, Mr. Graham.”

He lowers his eyes and covers the Snickers with the wrapper before pushing it farther down the bed.

“Don’t call me that, please.”

“Okay.” She waits. “Is it not your real name?”

“Jack didn’t tell you my real name?”

“He did.” She gives him an opening to speak, but he remains silent. “I looked it up to see what its origins were: Mal’ak ha-mashḥit, the destroying angel.”

“Sorry if you were expecting Michael or Gabriel.” One eyebrow twitches upward, almost in annoyance if she didn’t know any better. “They're much better-behaved than I am and more well-versed in conversation and matters of the flesh.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Don’t patronize me. You think I’m crazy; this discussion is tedious.”

“I just want to find out who you are, Will, really.”

He takes a breath, sighs, and runs a hand roughly through his hair. “Test me.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t convince you of my identity if I talked your ear off all day long; you’re far too rational to believe that I am who I say I am. Besides, I have no intention of wasting your time like that in the first place.”

She thinks to call Jack, but she has nothing prepared to say to him. It’s not her wish to tease this man with some distant promise that she will submit to this fantasy he’s constructed for himself, but she can’t simply shut down his request either. There’s too much riding on it; Jack and the team have faith in him, and they’re trusting Alana not to dismiss him the way they fought not dismiss him either.

“I need a minute. Will you give me a minute?”

His shoulders slump a fraction of an inch, and he exhales lightly, nostrils flaring once. He nods.

A strange weight like that of many strings holding her frame averse to gravity releases her and she leaves the room. Closing the door behind her, she strides into the deserted waiting room and removes her phone from her pocket. Her thumb hovers absentmindedly over the “K” subsection of her contacts list. Sighing, she presses the entry for Beverly Katz.

She answers on the fifth ring, sounding distracted but attentive.

“Beverly,” Alana begins hesitantly. “Alana Bloom; I’m calling about Will Graham. Is this a bad time?”

“I have a minute.” Something clangs on the other line and then settles. “What’s up? He didn’t get in your head too much, did he?”

Alana frowns at the phrasing of the question but shakes it off. “No, he’s fine. I’m just not sure what the best way to go about approaching his situation would be.”

“What situation? Did something happen?”

“He thinks he fell from heaven, Beverly. Jack believes him; it isn’t healthy to let him think his delusions are real.”

A few beats of silence crackle over their connection. Someone’s walking on Beverly’s side; the hollow clap of footsteps intensifies and then fades away.

“Listen, if you had been there; if you had seen him…”

“I agree that finding him the way he was must have been shocking, but that doesn’t mean he told you the truth about everything else.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. It was something else seeing him like that, but it’s not what I was talking about. When we came back with him to the hospital, he wasn’t even set back by what happened. He’d just been struck by lightning and those things on his back…but there he was, sitting pretty with this frustrating peaceful look on his face like he didn’t even mind us keeping him up all night or that he was stuck in the hospital.

“And then he did that thing that he does, and he kept doing it like he couldn’t control it and it made him so embarrassed but also weirdly satisfied.”

 _You’ll see what he can do,_ Jack had told her.

“Wait, what thing does he do?”

“It’s like he has this ability to sort of make you see and feel what he does; it’s like mind control almost.”

“Reverse empathy,” Alana concludes, looking over her shoulder in the direction of Will’s room. “I did feel that, I think.”

“Yeah, that’s not jetlag; that’s Will.”

“How?” If Beverly hears her breathlessness she doesn’t comment on it. Alana’s grateful in either case.

“Well, I don’t know _how_ , but he does. It’s like his equivalent of having a regular emotional reaction. He can dial it back, but he doesn’t like to. From the way he talks about it, he won’t always be able to communicate his feelings so easily.”

“He’s on a timer?”

“He’s acclimatizing,” Beverly corrects her. She adds, “Settling into his skin.”

Alana frowns at the glowing vending machine, hunger clenching in her stomach.

“Let’s say he is what he says he is then.”

“Okay.”

“Why does Jack want his help on the Cross Killer case?”

“Will’s got perspective. I’m sure you know by now that Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit is in the records as an angel of death.” Alana hears the near coy lilt in Beverly’s words. “Hypothetically, I mean.”

“So he can reconstruct the murders, just by looking at the photos?”

She imagines Beverly smiling on the other line, though there’s no indication anywhere in the tone of her voice or in her choice of words. She says, “He needs a little bit more than that, but he has helped some. We’re getting closer to finding the guy, and hopefully when Will gets out of the hospital we’ll get him the access he needs to see it better.”

With no short amount of stunned unrestraint, Alana murmurs, “You really believe in him.”

“ _I_ really do. Right now, your opinion of him matters more than mine does.”

“I don’t know what to think.” Alana shakes her head lightly and presses her fingers to her temples. “It’s crazy, Beverly; what he’s saying is impossible. There’s no way any of it’s true.”

Softly, Beverly asks her, “Why not?”

And there really is no reason it couldn’t be true apart from the simple fact that it shouldn’t be. Alana covers her mouth with a hand and breathes evenly in and out, in and out.

“Would it really throw everything out of balance if he was telling the truth?”

“Wouldn’t it?” She can’t ask a more specific question. A more specific answer would completely unsettle her, and as it is, she can’t seem to find her center or slow her heartbeat. “God and heaven and angels, I can believe in those things, but a man on pain medication with scars and impaired vision who fell in love once…how can he be so human if he isn’t?”

“Funny thing,” Beverly muses gently. “He asked me that same question, almost verbatim, the morning Jack called you.”

The admission steadies Alana, even as she can’t discern why. She falls delicately into an uncomfortable chair and switches the phone to her other ear. The man from earlier with the stroller sits now at the very edge of the wide rectangle of chairs as far away from Alana as he can physically be without having to stand. A young girl, maybe in her mid-teens sits beside him; they are both on edge. Alana can practically feel their agitation.

She jolts a little bit when she hears Beverly’s voice in her again. She tells her, “It can’t hurt to hear him out.”

“Only if you’re right about him.”

“I am right about him,” she states without any hint of doubt to her words. “I trust him.”

Alana nods slightly to herself and curtly thanks Beverly before ending the call and retreating to the lobby for coffee. She drinks half of it before returning to Will’s room. He is standing at the bedside of the comatose woman, the IV line pulled taut but not to the point of tugging at his skin. Rather than speak, she walks around to stand at his side.

“Your friends have a lot of faith in you,” she says quietly, illogically wary of disturbing Mrs. Dolarhyde.

He hums and murmurs back, “Big word: faith.”

She turns her head to watch him. He doesn’t return her glance.

“Why are you here?”

“I told you,” he whispers in that same gentle tone. “I fell in love with the wrong person.”

“Who was it?”

“Ose.” He swallows once and shuffles backward toward the bed to sit down. “His name was Ose.”

“You met him in Tenochtitlan.”

“Yes, he was…” Will licks his lips. “Ose is a demon. At the time that I was sent down to Earth the first time, I was ordered to capture him, destroy him if I could, but we were—he wasn’t what I expected.”

“What were you expecting?”

“A fire-breathing dragon or something equally menacing,” he chuckles. He rubs his hands together slowly, eyes stubbornly downcast. “I _knew_ he would look and act and feel human, but I think I was too young to understand what that meant; I thought I knew what it was to be human, but I wasn’t prepared for him. He was extraordinary.” He shakes his head almost fondly. Alana positions the chair at his left closer to the bed and sits.

“Did you know who he was when you first met?”

“The first time I did; the very first time I caught sight of him, I knew.” He nods solemnly and continues, “They look different to us, demons. The very good ones can get by fooling us with their false skins, but usually they don’t have the self-control for it. Ose could fool the best of us. It’s why he went unchained for so long. I have a gift for seeing his unique brand of chaos; this reason is also Jack’s motivation for seeking my help with this Croix Tueur he’s after.”

Alana nods. It does make sense, though she still doesn’t condone it.

She tells herself this conversation is purely hypothetical and that she hasn’t yet taken that required leap of faith. Will probably detects her dilemma, but as she doesn’t put it to words, he doesn’t either.

“How did Ose get close enough to seduce you?”

The phrasing causes a red flush to spatter across his nose and down his neck again. She smiles small but doesn’t go so far as to laugh. Clearly a great deal of his shame comes from the answer to this question.

“Ose was clever. He had been in the practice of possession for so many years by then that he could transport himself across multiple beings in a single day. He would run circles around me and make me look a fool in the tiyānquiztli in the middle of the workday when foot traffic in the streets was at its busiest.”

“He knew you were after him.”

“They can see us just like we can see them. It’s more difficult for us to hide from them than for them to hide from us. Deception was never meant to be one of our strong suits, but you can see that this pursuit became something of a playful chase for us as time went on. It shouldn’t have; I was wrong to have let him affect me in such a way, but it felt nearly unavoidable by the time events fanned out.

“It spiraled eventually, and he confronted me. He wore the face of a local woman, the same one he had taken the first night I went down to catch him. I should clarify that ideas of gender aren’t really well-established for us insofar as we don’t actually possess sexual characteristics in our true forms. You may have been wondering about it.”

“I’m more concerned about the aftermath than the logistics. Besides, it isn’t really my place to judge that sort of thing, your preferences—or lack thereof, I guess.”

A faint smile flickers across his lips: approval.

“No, but people do take that right upon themselves.”

“People do,” Alana acquiesces with a slight tip of her head.

“Neither of us are just people, I suppose,” he says with a secretive sort of smirk brewing on his mouth. Before she can inquire more as to what he means by that, he goes on. “Ose tricked me that day that he came to me with that woman’s face. He spoke to me like he didn’t know me or what my purpose for being there was. It was actually quite nice, before I discovered his identity.” His eyebrows twitch upward once. “I don’t think he even intended to kill me; he just wanted to see what I would do, what I looked like up close.”

“What did he look like? You must have formed an opinion in that first meeting.”

“Before he became Ose to me, when I still mistook him for a mortal woman outlandishly taken with me, I thought him…sage.” He furrows his eyebrows once and bites his lip. “He was unlike any other being I’d ever met, and when it looked as if he was a mere human so far ahead of his time, I felt almost drawn in by that wisdom thus far unmatched.”

“How did you recognize him for who he really was?”

“It was something in the yurt that he had that didn’t match with everything else. It was a woodcutting of Mictlantecuhtli and Quetzalcoatl, old Aztec gods.” He says their names again, pronunciation flawless as far as Alana can remember from the two classes she took in grad school on old Aztec civilizations. He clarifies, “King of Mictlan and the feathered serpent, respectively.”

“Why focus on religious items if those gods were worshipped in that time?”

“It wasn’t a traditional rendering, this artwork. I still remember it clear as day,” he says wistfully. “It was like a caricature, totally disrespectful of the deities. Such sacrilege would have been seen as a direct taunt at the gods. It was quite an obvious misstep on his part. I think he may have done it on purpose.”

He catches himself smirking and schools his expression into one of stoic impassivity.

“Is that how you fell in love?” Alana watches her voice. The odds that she will spook him with such a question are high, and she doesn’t mean to overstep her bounds.

“It’s how I did.” He frowns and pulls his feet up on the bed. He sounds tired when he speaks again: “I don’t think he reciprocated so much as he was _interested_ in me. It must have piqued his curiosity that I had been handpicked to go after him.” Morosely, he adds, “He would’ve loved to see me fall. No doubt he’s been waiting.”

“He hasn’t been found?”

“No one else ever got as close as I did. My Father, though; he wouldn’t send me down again after…” Will shifts his eyes toward the door and shuffles onto his back—unsubtle hints that Alana should leave.

She studies him for a few moments more before standing to her feet and gathering her coat from the chair on the opposite side of the bed. As she’s shrugging into it, she tells Will that she’ll sign off on his papers. The hospital isn’t the right place for him; once he can handle being on his feet, he should be on his feet.

“Thank you,” he mumbles sleepily. He takes his glasses off, all thumbs, and sets them on the bedside drawer. She folds them for him and sets them back down. Will is already asleep by the time she makes it to the door. She exits the room quietly, considering how nice it would be to fall asleep on command like that every time someone brought up an uncomfortable topic for discussion.

Her first move is to call Jack, though she makes a side note to talk to Will’s doctor before leaving the hospital. He answers on the fourth ring.

“So what’s the prognosis?”

“He’ll live,” Alana states with certainty. “Though I don’t know how suited for your line of work he is.”

“But you believe his story after all,” Jack surmises with a hint of haughty self-satisfaction.

“I believe him, but that doesn’t mean this couldn’t all go horribly wrong. He’s never been in a situation like the one you’re proposing, Jack. Will is of a very sensitive temperament. He thinks he isn’t, and maybe he’s got you fooled into thinking that he’s right, but too much of this could really hurt him.”

“I’ve told him that I’ll cover him, Dr. Bloom.”

“Well, I hope for everyone’s sake that you will then.”

“Grew on you, didn’t he?”

“Don’t undermine my professional opinion, Jack. I do like him, but I want him taken care of more than I want to be friends.”

“But you do want to be friends.”

“Of course I do; he’s interesting.”

She recalls Will’s words about the demon Ose: _I don’t think he reciprocated so much as he was interested in me._

“If you let this hurt him,” she starts to say.

“I won’t, Alana. I’m good at my job, aren’t I?”

She thinks back to the one exception to that rule but doesn’t bring it up. Jack never needs a reminder of what happened to Miriam Lass. Jack bases his every waking action on what happened to Miriam Lass.

Alana swallows and says, “You’re one of the best, Jack.”

“Thank you.”

“I need to see Dr. Archambault about his psych evaluation. I’m clearing him.”

“I appreciate this, doctor.”

“Let’s hope you don’t change your mind about that.”

“Hopefully he won’t give me any reason to.”

Alana hopes he won’t either, vehemently.

They hang up and Alana leaves a message for Dr. Munashe Archambault with the receptionist on Will’s floor before taking the elevator down to the ground floor and walking briskly out into the late afternoon. The snow has since stopped falling but has stuck on the ground to leave everything blanketed infrequently in muddied slush and unblemished white. The breeze whips delicately around her and takes her hair in a few whispering strokes.

She hails a cab back to the Royal St. Charles Hotel, dirty, wet New Orleans streets flashing up around the cab in tinted orange and yellow with the sunset. She pays the driver and walks through the lobby to the elevator, shivering the snow and the cool air off her shoulders.

Her fingers twitch nervously in her pockets all the way up to her room. Once she’s safely cloistered away behind the locked door, a strange thought flutters to mind. She digs her phone out of her pocket and seeks out the “L” subsection before thinking better of it and setting it on the dresser instead.

Hannibal would only think she was out of her mind for buying into such a fantastical story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titles and lyrics from Johnny Cash
> 
> Tiyānquiztli = marketplace, according to Wikipedia and several other online sources


	6. I Corinthians 15:55

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Just let me sail into your harbor of lights/And there and forever to cast out my night/Give me my task/And let me do it right/And do it with all of my might_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will is finally well enough to look at a physical crime scene.

Jack brings Will a bag of clothes punctured through with paper tags just after Will has had his breakfast. The nurses informed Will already that he’s okay to be discharged sometime today, so he has been waiting for the man to come back around. He apparently breaches some unspoken code of conduct by standing and starting to undo the strings connecting the back flaps of the hospital gown just as Jack begins to sit down. He flies up immediately and waves his hands.

Seeing the confused surprise on Will’s face, he tones it down slightly and leads him into the separate restroom by the door so Will can get dressed in privacy. It’s a concept fairly unknown to him, nudity as a shameful, confidential aspect of their current society.

Will removes each item of clothing from the paper bag and lays them out side by side on the floor before deciding on the soft blue shirt with intersecting white and gray cross patterns all over. He slips his arms through, incorrectly the first time as he can’t button it up properly, and sets the smaller button-up shirts back in the bag. Warily, he eyes the tan slacks, the denim jeans, and the smaller pale blue pair of shorts. He presses his lips together and thinks back to the cold weather outside and the way it chilled his naked skin.

Stepping his feet carefully into the proper pant legs, he pulls the tan slacks up gradually. He still manages, somehow, to teeter too far to the left and pitch over onto the floor in a heap. Jack knocks tentatively on the door but doesn’t open it when Will calls out an answer.

He hears the man say, “Everything all right in there?”

Will struggles onto his back and pulls the slacks up all the way before huffing a sigh and sitting up. He stuffs everything else back in the bag and fumbles the dark green hospital socks off his feet in favor of the white tube socks Jack bought for him. He heads back out into the room and takes a dark brown pair of shoes from the box Jack chooses for him. When it becomes apparent that Will has never had to tie shoelaces before and therefore has no conception of how to make a knot out of a length of string, Jack patiently undoes his own laces and models the steps. Will only needs to see him do it once to be able to repeat the actions on his own.

“Here, you need these.” Jack hands him the pair of oft forgotten glasses, and Will takes them. “Where we’re going, you’re going to want to be able to see.”

Will dons a warm jacket that smells vaguely of Beverly Katz and follows Jack out into the bustling hallway. The sterile air is heavy with a distant melancholy, stinging desperation, and a vague touch of sickness that pierces through the foggy veil of antiseptic wash and rubbing alcohol. He holds the collar of the jacket closer to his face and closes his eyes around an unimagined scream several floors above them. He weaves after Jack toward the elevator following something instinctual and primeval like a heat signature in the dark or ultrasound echolocation.

They go down the elevator to one. Jack is telling him about the most recent developments in the case of La Croix Tueur. Will listens infrequently. He focuses most of his attention on discerning what patterns Beverly Katz left behind in the jacket. He can feel the way her fingers critically squeezed the material bunched up at the left shoulder and the way one questing palm and five fingertips ran up the inside of the back to test for texture. It’s comfortable the way Beverly touches; he feels safe and individuated swaddled up in this item she touched and picked for him.

When they get into the car, Jack hands him an updated file with new pictures. There are fewer bodies in this case. Where there were three in the first killing and four in the second, there are now only two: a man and a woman, a husband and a wife. The man was crucified post-mortem, though the woman’s autopsy apparently suggests she was alive when her murderer strung her up in the doorway of the wedded couple’s bedroom.

There are suggestions in every minor detail, in the way her clothes have been rumpled and her hair ripped out in clumps. Her husband suffered no worse than she did. He never saw their assailant. Will checks the file for the names: Bertrand and Ila Sauveterre.

Bertrand Sauveterre was dead before he knew what hit him. Ila Sauveterre fought admirably to her dying breath.

“We’re considering that this could be the work of a copycat. What do you think?”

Will focuses in on the fine lines of the woman’s face. She appears peaceful in death. Her last moments had been so violent, so viciously sanguine. He closes the file and leans his head back against the seat. Clara Street is comprised of dirty white slush and wet black asphalt. He feels the tires hum beneath him body and relaxes into the vibrations. Jack glances his way once before turning his eyes back to the road.

“It’s the same person.”

“How can you tell?”

“Ripples in a pond,” Will murmurs. He brushes his fingers along the back of the file idly and contemplates the sky. He knows what unseen, spectacular creations exist out in the ether beyond his mortal scope, but the very nature of it as something he can’t see drives a wedge into the very center of him and fills his core with ice.

Faith exists for the purpose of extinguishing that helplessness, that grievous despair that overwhelms him now. He squeezes his eyes shut tightly and hums in response to Jack’s inquiry.

“If you’re in any kind of pain I can take you back to the hospital, Will.” Jack still announces his pseudonym rather strangely as if it were a foreign address and not a common first name. “I’m under strict advisement from Dr. Bloom to make sure none of this hurts you, and letting you overexert yourself so soon after being discharged from the hospital falls into that category.”

With interest, Will asks, “What else falls into that category?”

Jack is prepared for his questions. He doesn’t have to consider his words before speaking them. He says, “Letting you get too close would be the other thing.”

“What does that mean?”

Jack huffs a soft sigh.

“There was something you said the night we found you.” Will’s body goes still, and something heavy and warm in his chest stutters and takes his breath the same way. “You said you feel too much, that you empathize too easily.”

He relaxes slightly, still wary as to where this conversation might be going.

“I did say that.”

“If you feel that way in the field, if you feel like you can’t handle it at any moment, I need you tell someone. Can you do that?”

He has the tone of a parent speaking to a child, but Jack doesn’t sound inherently patronizing. He just sounds cautious. Jack _feels_ cautious; deep in the erratic syncopations knocking behind Will’s ribs, he feels cautious. He feels cautious in unsettling waves that build and push and pull the longer they avoid what Jack really wants to ask Will about.

“Do you want me to tell you about the Lithuanian boy?”

“You’ve told me enough about the Lithuanian boy,” Jack says as he pulls the car into the parking lot of a bustling police station. He switches off the car, and they wait. The air goes cold in the space between them in the absence of the rumbling heater.

“I didn’t tell you anything about him.” Will shakes his head solemnly. “His sister, what was done to her, yes; I did explain to you at length what happened to her, and she is, as far as I can ascertain, the reason I was cast out.”

“The reason you fell, you mean.”

“No, I told you it took forty years for that decision to be made. Those forty years were a means of penance. It was exile.”

Jack fixes him with a stare. He sets the hand holding his car keys on his thigh.

“If you weren’t in exile for letting that girl die, what were you in exile for?”

Will drops his eyes, finding that they feel dry and uncomfortable when he looks directly at Jack. He takes a breath and looks out the windshield at the sparse branches of the trees touched by winter. He tugs on the sleeve of the jacket feeling the impression of Beverly’s fingertips where they smoothed over the cuffs.

A grimace taps at the corners of his mouth. He sighs.

“I let him live.”

“You make it sound like it was the worst thing you ever did.”

“It was.” Will bites his lip. “It was meant to be, all along.”

He hasn’t told Jack about Ose. There is no immediate push in him to rectify his ignorance. It feels like a small blessing to have one secret, to have a secret of this sort. Bits and pieces of the story exist among the people Will has been exposed to so far. It would serve him best for no one to know the entirety of the story. It would protect him to keep that horrible trauma buried within his body. He feels that it would anyway; feels that he would be safest barricading it inside himself like another twitching red organ tucked away beneath his skin.

Fiddling distractedly with his keys, Jack warns him, “If you want out, this is the time to say so.”

“I want to stay.”

“All right then.” He stills with his hand on the door. “No mention of past lives or divinity or singed angel wings, got it? The last thing we need is a media storm ranting and raving about a crazy person consulting with the proper authorities to catch a serial killer.”

“Crazy person,” Will mutters under his breath as he follows Jack out into the fresh air and up onto the sidewalk. The building is gray concrete and simple tiled floors. He keeps his eyes trained to the walls. Sounds echo throughout the room and across the high ceiling. He hears conversations; a few are calm, some are panicked, one of them is pleading. He searches for a face.

There are a few people sitting and fidgeting in plastic chairs. Some of them are collected and silent; some of them shiver with various mixtures of misery, anger, and fear. One man by himself in a corner moans and shakes, hungry for something he cannot sate and desperate for something much more superficial that he could remedy easily for a price. Will frowns around that peculiar brand of soul sickness so often intertwined with addiction and slides his gaze away, still searching for the one who pleads to no one in a register so nearly like that of a person in prayer.

His eyes next find a woman with her hands set nonchalantly in her lap, thin brown wrists shackled together by a short length of shining metal. Her eyes are dark around the corners with intentional marks of smudged kohl lining them in. Her lips wear the matte stain of a deep, alluring maroon.

That same color once haunted his dreams and eluded his nightmares. It followed him through humid, labyrinthine green and led him through miraculous, enthralling cloudbursts. It flashed in greeting through the deepest mahogany iris and the palest reflective ocher of an animal’s shifting nocturnal eyes.

Will blinks away those familiar, temporal scenes. The woman of the red lips catches Will’s eye and winks.

A hand falls heavily on his shoulder and steers him into movement. Will lets Jack guide the way to a hallway and up into a corner room. He scans the new environment for Beverly, Price, or Zeller. He finds a dark-skinned man flipping sternly through a manila folder. The deep wrinkle through his brow drops away when he notices Will watching him. He glances at Jack over Will’s shoulder and then steps forward to shake Will’s hand after receiving some nonverbal answer from Jack.

“Lloyd Bowman. You’re Graham, right? I mean, not really, but that’s what we’re going with?”

Will studies him, not quite assembled yet from his backward lapse in time. The man called Bowman tugs at his hand where Will hasn’t bothered to release his hold. Unperturbed, he tucks the manila folder under his detained right arm, takes his freed left hand through his hair a few times to ruffle the short black crew cut, and takes the file again. Will looks down at their hands and lets go of him uncertainly, though it feels better to hold on and be held in return. Bowman gives him a curious look and grips Will’s arm cajolingly, tenderly as if he understands on some level what it is Will is struggling to reconcile.

There’s a memory resting in that touch. There’s a deep connection to words permanently left unspoken and promises forever kept.

“He’s doing that thing, isn’t he?”

Bowman’s smiling cheerfully at Jack over Will’s shoulder. When he turns to look, Jack has a puzzled, intrigued expression on his face. He’s wondering just what Will could do given the room to stretch his legs the way Jack clearly advocates.

“You remind me of my nephew.” He takes his hand away, and the golden thread of warmth tying his past with Will’s present dissolves. “He can get really frantic if he doesn’t have someone to hold onto sometimes.”

A phone rings somewhere in the crowded room, and Jack answers. He relays four pressing commands, asks one question, and tells a joke Will doesn’t get until after Jack disconnects the call.

“Oh,” Will remarks. He turns to look at Jack over his shoulder, prompting Bowman and Jack both to give him their attention. He laughs, entertained. “You and me like _‘U’_ and me: _assume_.” He chuckles.

Bowman raises his eyebrows at Jack, amused. Jack shakes his head.

“Forensics is done with the house.” To Will, he asks, “You ready?”

There’s no other answer to give. He says, “Yes.”

“You want me here, Sir?”

“Yeah, hold down the fort, Bowman. Thanks.”

He nods and turns on his heels after leaving Will with a smile and a solid pat on the shoulder. Bowman is kind, unassuming. Jack’s team is exceptional, Will decides as he follows Jack back through the hall. He keeps his eyes honed in on Jack’s back as they come back into the main atrium of the building. The pleading has since ceased. Will wants to search out the woman of the red lips again, but he suspects it would do him no good to tease open old wounds the same color as that smirking feminine mouth.

They go back into the car and Will waits out the cold, grateful for the heat that steadily warms his chilled fingers. Jack doesn’t speak as they drive but presses a button for the radio that sparks into song. Will stares at the contraption and marvels at the sounds coming forth from it. The last time he heard music was the songs of men in Tenochtitlan.

“You can change it if you want.”

Will tests a few buttons, finds a few talk radio stations, scowls at the suggestion of tinny, jingling bells, and finally stumbles upon a shuffling guitar riff kept in time by a consistent, muffled beat. He holds his fingers suspended over the _4_ button and then drops his hand to his knee, fingers clenching reflexively around the clothed pieces of his body.

A voice emerges from the creeping notes of the guitar and sings, “I’m going down south I’m going down south I’m going down south until the wind don’t blow.”

The music possesses the illusion of a rushed tempo in places that slows and then picks up anew. Will is sure he imagines it, but he can’t say for sure. He does actively imagine the shivering coils of copper strings wound tightly together and vibrating around music; the mechanical static of feedback unfurling in the air like a black smoke cloud; the bass notes falling on every other downbeat as if in step with a drunken man staggering home; moisture and mosquitoes and bucolic leaves just beginning to fade with the changing of the seasons.

“I’d rather be dead, I’d rather be dead; I’d rather be dead and six feet in the ground—for some other man, for some other man always hanging around.”

His skin warms with the suggestion of a hot, burning sun beating down over wet marshlands. His toes flex and feel balmy as if with sweat, as if he were walking barefoot across a wood paneled floor. The slight hum of notes sounding out whirs in his mind’s eye like countless fans filling a room with noise stacked upon noise stacked upon noise. His feet leave bloody footprints as he moves throughout the halls of an empty house.

“Going, going, going.”

There are bodies suspended by unseen crosses with their arms held at ninety degree angles to their bodies. Blood drips down from their toes and stains the wood floor maroon. He looks around and counts the dead. There are nine of them, hanging and staring and sapped of vitality.

“Don’t care where you go.”

It’s intentional the way they were chosen to suffer the way that they did, but a flaw existed in the design somewhere. Bertrand Sauveterre had not suffered. Ila had struggled, but the violence that was done to her came from a passion bred of fear, not of aggression, hatred, or rage.

“I’m going with you, babe. I’m going with you, babe. I’m going with you, babe. I’m going with you, babe.”

It was forced and out of hand, wild. Ila Sauveterre had startled her killer, maybe. One of them wasn’t supposed to be there, or—no.

_No, that’s not it at all._

“I’m going with you, babe. I’m going with you, babe. I don’t care where you go.”

He opens his eyes to find the car is still moving and the notes thrumming still toward the song’s end. He studies Jack’s profile and switches off the radio.

Softer than he would like, Will says, “It was an accident.”

“What?” Jack turns onto a residential street.

“He didn’t go to the Sauveterres with the intention of killing either of them. He _knew_ them.”

Jack stares hard out the windshield, making a strange face like he’s trying to understand where the intuitive leap came from. He parks the car at the end of the street near a corner facing the highway. There’s a wall blocking it off from the neighborhood, but Will is aware of the car shaking with the force of all that heavy machinery racing by at lethal speeds. It’s another presence he can’t see but that he can feel and catalogue in his mind for later.

“How do you figure?”

“Think about the risk he was taking going after two more victims so soon after he just left us a crime scene a few days ago. The first two were nearly a week and a half apart. He planned them, meticulously. He would’ve kept himself hidden after this; he would’ve made you search for him a little while longer before giving you more clues to go on.”

“Then why go through the trouble of letting us know he killed Bertrand and Ila Sauveterre if they turn out to be our ticket to finding him?”

“A serial killer targets anonymous victims; the best murder, the most elusive _ripple_ in the pond, is the one that can’t be traced back to any source. 

“Disguise a traceable crime of passion as the untraceable work of an active serial killer,” Jack murmurs. “That’s brilliant.”

“Except all he’s done is given you motive and a social network.”

Jack turns to look at Will, looking distinctly impressed. He lifts both eyebrows and says, jokingly, “What was that you said about pictures not being enough?”

“I used the music, too,” Will protests. His fingers idle on the door handle. His legs twitch with nervous energy. He wants to see the crime scene; wants to know how much clearer he could see the picture if just given the chance to touch the walls and walk through the empty rooms and look upon the dried pools of blood caked in the carpet and chipping off the walls. “Can we still go in?”

Jack nods and opens his door. They cross the street together and meet Price and Beverly on the edge of the lawn in front of the narrow two-story house. Will peeks slightly around Jack to see Zeller boxing up a complex kit of drawers at the bottom of the staircase. A few more agents trickle out of the front door and head down to the road. A few give Jack, and especially Will, questioning looks, but no one approaches them. Price watches them with an air of amusement. Beverly doesn’t pay them any mind at all. She’s eyeing Will’s jacket.

“It looks good on you.”

“It’s very comfortable.”

He smiles widely and softly, she says, “You’re welcome.”

Zeller comes plodding down the brick walkway. He has a duffel bag over one shoulder and the rolling kit behind him. Price steps around his side to take the duffel and Zeller lets him.

“Angel boy walks among us,” he teases. “How’re you feeling, Graham?”

“Ready to work,” he answers, giving Jack a brief glance. “I remembered my glasses.”

“Very impressive.” Zeller laughs and digs around in a side compartment for something before trying the duffel and procuring a pair of latex gloves for Will to wear. “Scene’s already been processed, so you won’t compromise any evidence, but you still want to use those, okay?”

Will nods, fits them over his fingers, and strolls up to the door to slip inside. Zeller was the last one to file out of the house, so he is all alone but for the memories screeching on the walls and in the furniture. He can hear Jack explaining the possible new angle Will suggested from the other side of the closed front door. Zeller’s the first one to say anything in response, but when his retort has nothing to do with Lécuyer and turns out to be a question, Will continues on through the house, disinterested.

He walks through the kitchen, running his protected hands across the smooth granite surfaces and studying the photographs pinned to the refrigerator. Colorful magnets on the fridge spell, _J-E- -N-_

He manages to find two more magnetic letters on the kitchen tile: a green _N_ and a purple _Y_. The letters fit back into place to spell a girl’s name. He stares for a moment, wondering who Jenny is and why a married couple with no children would have alphabet magnets on their fridge; a niece, in all likelihood.

_Did it happen here?_

An altercation could have broken out over dinner. Someone went for the phone; someone tried to leave. Maybe the Sauveterres tried to make their guest leave. He stalks out of the kitchen and climbs the white carpeted staircase. A massive oval of red has congealed at the bottom of the staircase, identified as belonging to Bertrand Sauveterre.

Droplets of blood punctuate the ascending steps in uneven intervals as they dripped from the blade that had been used to kill him. Will follows the trail to the master bedroom and takes in the sight of the red on the splintered door frames and crusted into the floor. There’s a smeared handprint on the yanked bedspread where Ila Sauveterre attempted to hold on against her attacker’s influence. It hadn’t worked to save her.

Will closes his eyes and reverses the events of the evening in his mind until the moment the plastic alphabet magnets were knocked off the refrigerator. It could have been the force of slamming the door, or perhaps she had been shoved into it by someone else in the room. That initial act of violence had done it; that single unfortunate event had been the catalyst.

He pictures Ila leaving the room first, enraged or afraid or he isn’t quite sure just what and Bertrand attempting to console her and their guest simultaneously, trying to _manage_ the situation. He only wanted it so that no one was hurt by what had happened.

The flaw in his strategy, of course, is that their leave is misinterpreted as a retreat. Everything is ruined from that moment on.  
 _  
I catch Mr. Sauveterre off-guard; his back is to me when I step forward and slice him open from ear to ear. Mrs. Sauveterre turns at the sound, surprised to see what has happened. She is not immediately afraid for her life. She tries to save her husband but to no avail._

Ila Sauveterre’s hands had been bloody when she ran upstairs to the bedroom. The killer had blocked off her most viable escape route and forced her hand but not before allowing her a moment to hold Bertrand Sauveterre in his final moments alive. It was kind, as their killer saw it, to allow that small mercy. He could have killed her on the spot; he could have made it about cruelty and punishment the way the other homicides had been, but not the Sauveterres’.

It was never supposed to be the Sauveterres.  
 _  
I follow her up the stairs to the bedroom. She tries to keep me out and call for help, but I kick in the door and drag her off the bed when she tries to climb over it and get passed me. She struggles, but I am the one holding the weapon. I am the weapon. I am stronger than she is._

Will pauses in the reconstruction to stoop down and peer under the bed. He had read something in the file about several of her most fatal wounds showing further signs of inflammation. He roots around pairs of shoes and lands the tips of his fingers on a solid tube with a button at the top he is careful not to press. Grabbing it securely by the end of the cylinder, he drags the mace out and analyzes it from a safe distance.

She really did put up a fight. Will hopes she put the guy who did this to her through hell. The container’s half empty, which could mean that she did.

He straightens out and surveys the room, tossing the spray onto the ruined bedspread. Stepping out of the rust-smelling room and into the upstairs hallway, Will explores the rooms to the right of the master bedroom. He finds a linen closet, a large bathroom, and a tiny guest room stocked with a futon and many unpacked boxes.

On the left of the bedroom he finds a nursery with the name _Jennifer_ carved into the cradle.

Will sighs and runs his fingers over the smooth polished wood. He takes one long glance around the cold, darkened room and leaves it behind. He hadn’t read anything about a baby in the files. Maybe they had miscarried or planned to adopt or had acquired the cradle from a sibling whose daughter had been named Jennifer and who frequently visited to spell her name on the refrigerator. It’s a painful, tragic ache in his chest, what happened to the Sauveterres. 

All he can do to atone for the evil of the act committed against them, for the fundamental role he played in it in years long passed as an agent of death, is find the person that reduced their lives to this chaos. He starts to descend the stairs when the front door opens and Jack’s voice comes echoing up blindly.

“Will, we’ve got a lead. Have you got what you came for?”

He turns to look at the neglected nursery adjacent to a bedroom transformed into a place of death.

“Yeah, I got it, Jack.”

He goes back out onto the front driveway and reverently avoids stepping on the neatly trimmed grass that Jack’s agents have been treading all morning. They get back in the car and Jack takes them somewhere to get coffee, though Will is sure they don’t expressly need it.

He sips it carefully and sifts through the cinnamon, anise, and ginger flavors in his drink and cradles it closely to his chest. It’s another delicious oddity of this transformed world that he deeply appreciates.

They are pulling up to another residence halfway across town when Will polishes off about half of the piping hot latte propped up between his palms. Jack is watching him like he’s done something funny, and by now, Will has learned to just accept the reality that he is a novel experience for them and that most things are novel experiences for him. There is no shortage of things Jack could find entertaining about Will _this_ time.

Jack doesn’t give him the chance to ask or think more critically about it.

He says, “We don’t know yet whether this lead is a strong one, but I can say that it feels productive having you onboard with us.”

“You knew the night you dug me out of that crater,” Will retorts tonelessly. Jack doesn’t do him the discourtesy of trying to deny it. “You knew before I fell.”

Jack turns his eyes out the window and then out ahead toward the building in which Will guesses Jack’s suspect is hiding.

“I even knew to bring shovels.” Jack chuckles softly and pauses for a few moments to breathe slowly in and out. “You know, I don’t think I’ve taken two seconds since it happened to really think about how any of it could have happened the way it did.” His face is awed when he looks back at Will. “If it had gone differently, if we had been somewhere else when you fell…”

“You were here for a reason,” Will assures him, though he isn’t so sure anymore that all good and bad things happen to fulfill preordained purposes. It sure as hell doesn’t make any sense to him.

“Then that means you fell when you did for a reason.”

Will sips his drink, trying to beat the dropping temperature of the liquid sloshing around in the paper cup. He swallows around air.

Quietly he says, “I tried to kill him.”

“The Lithuanian boy?”

Will nods once and sets the drained cup down. His teeth click and click in his mouth where he clenches and unclenches his jaw.

“He walked through the snow for days after the men who took his sister left him. He shouldn’t have survived. It should’ve killed him. It—it would have been…a kindness.” He closes his eyes, drops his head back against the seat, and curls his hands into fists where they rest on his thighs. “I deliberately disobeyed my Father’s commands. To punish me, He made it so that the boy would live. He made it so that I could never take his life to spare him his suffering.”

The irony, then, that the untouchable enemy had truly become untouchable.

“I have no idea why any of this has happened the way that it has,” Will confesses, fumbling again with his sleeve. “But I have to hope there is a reason for it.”

Optimistically, Jack tells him, “Could come sooner than you think.”

“It couldn’t come soon enough,” Will grumbles. He nods when Jack signals to him to get out of the car.

Maybe the explanation could come too soon. Maybe he wouldn’t be ready for the truth when it revealed itself to him. Maybe finally knowing would require him to change. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, follows Jack up the sidewalk, and sensing a shift in the breeze, looks up to catch a snowflake as it bursts apart on his cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goin' Down South by R.L. Burnside


	7. I Still Miss Someone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal looks into the situation in New Orleans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Oh, no, I never got over those blue eyes/I see them everywhere/I miss those arms that held me/When all the love was there_

They dine together on Thursday night, a fairly modest meal of liver and fava beans. Hannibal drinks Chianti, and Alana drinks beer. She is a pleasant dinner guest. He always enjoys seeing her at his dinner table.

He tells her the liver is calves’, for he knows she would react poorly if he told her the morsels belonged previously to an ill-tempered banker. He had lived through times and cultures where the partaking of human flesh was considered, with irregular variation, celebratory, traditional, religious, and practical. This society now, the American society of the twenty first century, suits him well, even if it is one that would condemn him if properly given the chance.

But, then, condemnation is a hat that suits him even better than a world overloaded and overwhelmed by sensation, information, and a staggering influx of carnal taboos. Every world he has experienced thus far would eject him if given a fighting chance, but only one ever had the potential to crush him. Only one had ever known him beyond just the regality of his infamy, beyond the seductive, cloying charm, and beyond the fantastically tailored people-suits.

Hannibal, Ose, can wear any suit that pleases him best. It has always been one of his strongest personal assets, his effortless talent for mimicry. The same one who was made to chase him had been built in much the same way, with an unparalleled proclivity for osmotic parasitism.

This One he thinks of often—not quite the archetypical _one that got away,_ though he had escaped from Hannibal via unfavorable means. Back when he was solely and definitively Ose, there had been one and only one to match him and to challenge him. This One, the only one, possessed a skill of seduction that was all his own and so entirely innocent and upsettingly _human_ that Hannibal could only ever have desired him.

Well, desire can end in any number of ways.

Exempli gratia, Hannibal finds humanity desirable. Id est, he savors them in the spirit of a Dionysian worshipper. He does so with drink, with evisceration, and with the subtlest mention of blood on his palate, a reminder of the life he rended from bone—magna est vis consuetudinis.

He watches his guest, this woman with whom he could have had much more than the occasional platonic dinner date had he valued her safety just a molecule less than he does. Alana Bloom is lovely by all standards, diverse in the strength of her mind as it pairs with the incorruptibility of her heart. Hannibal has never bought into sentimentality or attachment. However, an appreciation for refinement, for absolute beauty, has not eluded him in his relentless exposure to art over the course of his many lives and the odd death by immolation.

Hannibal alerts out of his thoughts by the minute straightening of Alana’s posture. The background static of their conversation amplifies toward the front of his mind. His eyes refocus from the past into the present moment. She sets down her fork and dabs around her deep raspberry lips with the cloth napkin.

“Do you think there’s any symbolism to that case in Louisiana, La Croix Tueur?”

“Were the victims crucified before or after death?”

He does not have to work very hard to feign interest in the topic. Murder, when it is not cheapened into a farcical manifestation of passion, has intrigued him for as long as he can remember.

“Before,” Alana answers. She takes a delicate sip of her beer, beer that Hannibal brews only for her. “There was one man, one of the most recent victims, who was dead before.”

“I would say they are not merely symbolic but ritualistic in that case, though the outlier would suggest against that particular theory.”

Alana inclines her head in agreement. There is more she is withholding from him, but he doesn’t press. What little she divulges in confidence extends only to the details that could be accessed publically online by anyone, anywhere, the lot of which she is, of course, aware. He would be sorely disappointed if she were the type to leak information, perilously curious as he is about the man in charge of the investigation, Jack Crawford.

She doesn’t give him anything he couldn’t have found out by himself, though she engages the evidence in such a way that Hannibal can only respond and interpret and deduce. He enjoys the doctor’s intellect; a keen mind in an age of distraction is, truly and infallibly, a wonder.

They finish their meal, conversation revolving around current psychiatric studies, academic journals floating around vying for publication, and their mutual colleagues. Alana mentions Frederic Chilton in passing, and Hannibal only barely conceals his reactionary smirk to the obvious restraint with which she speaks of the man. Hannibal doesn’t mind Chilton so much as he finds him quaintly amusing. When the lines of peaceful domesticity and excursionary violence intersect at a point of inactivity, he calls on the man for drinks. It serves as a nice palate cleanser, even if the night is not as entertaining as it perhaps could be with the aid of a slashed artery or severed limb.

One could handle only so many routine dismemberments and rudimentary exsanguinations before warranting a brief sabbatical. Of course, he could throw dinner parties, but those required that he procure and organize a feast beforehand. Rewarding as he has discovered the practice of culinary arts, it is not something that can be forced or spoken into existence.

Hannibal clears the table and brings them white wine granitas garnished with dried apple slices. It’s upon the first tasting that she says it, voices that thing she has been guarding behind her fair, faintly troubled brow since he opened his doors to her earlier in the evening. She asks him about angels.

He hides his surprise fairly well, unsure from the start why he should feel alarmed but knowing only that he does.

“Angels?”

“Yes.” She takes another small bite of the frosty white treat. “What do you think about angels?”

“I think if they existed,” he begins, treading carefully, “they would be intrinsically combative as they are mercenaries by design.”

“What do you think they’d be fighting for down here?” She smiles, a nervous twitch of muscles masquerading as facile shyness. “Hypothetically, I mean.”

“Perhaps they would be fighting for the disenchantment of humanity.”

Her smile is more open now, easier in her belief that Hannibal will entertain and not mock her inquiries.

“You think they would think us disenchanted?”

“Wouldn’t you, if from a realm of antiquity you had awoken into this chaos?”

“Most would see the advancement of civilization a move away from chaos,” she says. “Infrastructure, democracy, organized states.”

Hannibal smoothly counters, leaning forward just slightly in his seat, “Others would argue that at the very heart of the greatest civilizations lie corruption, immorality, and coercion. Here innocents are made to suffer for the flaws of an archaic judicial system, good men made to leave an honest craft for the rule of a mechanical age, and unsuspecting citizens made to turn on each other and themselves as the dues they have been promised are sapped dry from the source right under their noses while all they can do is watch as their futures drain away.”

“There’s plenty of wrong in the world,” Alana agrees, an argument prepared on the tail end of her assent. She smiles, a mysterious, delicate accident. “You’d be a cynic not to think of all the beauty left in it.”

“How could I forget of beauty,” he teases, a calm, flirtatious smile parting his lips. “When she walks in it, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies?”

An indulgent, breathy laugh startles out of her. An attractive red tint mists across the bridge of her nose and spreads down the apples of her cheeks. He would recite the length of the poem to her if he thought the action might impress her. Beyond the ambushed delivery of this one line, he knows she is not the type of woman to fawn and swoon maudlinly over remembered poetry. The sentiment, the fact that he thought to quote from it in the first place, charms her enough that anything pushed passed it would be overkill.

Never mind that Byron could very well have written the poem _for_ the striking Alana Bloom. He watches the flattery ebb from her visage into something calmer and more composed. It isn’t a conscious thing so much as it is a reflex. She is a focused person, balanced in both composure and frivolity, when the occasion permits.

She reminds him so much—with her dark curls and her mountain streams for eyes—of a time when he was much younger to the world. She reminds him of a glowing, exuberant past; of endless green; of hands and arms and Achilles’ heels sensitive to the touch. Since the day he first laid eyes on her, she had reminded him. And what was she but a gentle but determined human being built of fragile flesh and bone, fabricated and formed out of a place as complex and primeval as the realm from which he climbed hand over hand and shivering scapulae over unfurling tendril of black, bristling hide.

Alana Bloom reminds him, ruthlessly, of the incomparable One, about whom Byron also could have been describing when he wrote of darkness and light, when he wrote of heaven and contrast.

Indeed, a mind at peace and a heart whose love is innocent.

“Do the holidays always bring out a cheekier side of you?”

His chest hums with a low laugh. He keeps his voice at about that register, just at the point where it buzzes warmly in his throat.

“Perhaps I merely enjoy philosophizing with you about humanity.”

“Ever the academic, Hannibal,” she murmurs fondly over a spoonful of sparkling white granita. The muted lighting of the dining room catches every crystalline grain in tiny bursts of blue and green.

“You inquired as to my beliefs about angels. One cannot be more than academic in that respect.”

Her eyes shine, brightened by drink and by food and by perceived safety in his company. She sets down her spoon.

“What if you could be?”

He lets a moment skip between them and tilts his head to the side, brow furrowing just so in a harmless semblance of confusion.

“Under what circumstances would that be possible?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiles to herself and drops her eyes to the table. Her fingers push the emptied wine glass in slow circles on the tablecloth. Hannibal waits, fingers mimicking that same thoughtful pattern on his thigh. He swallows once and willfully shuts down the faint sparks of his impatience mounting inside him. He tells himself that whatever it is she would like to tell him won’t ultimately matter in the grand scheme of things, as so many things that humans do are temporary anyway.

He tells himself again and again, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s lying to himself. Even if dishonesty does not particularly upset him, this self-directed, unintentional brand of it sets his teeth on edge.

To thine own self, and all that.

“What if one was to fall?”

He looks up at her, drawn out of a blissfully blank abyss into the static.

When he doesn’t answer straight away, she continues, “What if you just happened to meet one?”

He muses cautiously, “Do you mean to confess to me that you really are an angel after all?”

She gives him an entertained, if mildly exasperated look. He will not attempt to flatter or seduce her again tonight. He takes up the dishes and doesn’t protest when she follows him into the kitchen.

“Could you believe in one if the evidence was right there in front of you?”

“Are we still speaking hypothetically, Dr. Bloom?”

“Could one be more than hypothetical in that respect, Dr. Lecter?”

A small smile is on her face when he turns to look at her. He inclines his head and begins washing their spoons and glasses.

“If tasked with the feat of accepting an impossible truth, would not the only rational option be to empirically test it and base one’s beliefs on the outcome?”

“How would you test an angel?”

Hannibal dries the glass in his hand and sets the cleaned dishes in their respective cupboards. He dries his hands before turning and leaning back casually against the counter, the dishtowel turning one way and then another before he folds it and sets it beside the basin of the sink. He opens his mouth to speak. A single contemplative moment of hesitation stalls his words, though there is no point in considering what he might do but only what he has already done.

“I would strip him of his God and see if what was left was more human or beast.”

If she is shocked by his statement, she doesn’t show it. The suggestion of a pout touches her mouth, more an expression of pondering than of actual pouting.

“And without God, you think an angel would be reduced to a beast.”

He tells her, “In absentia lucis, tenebrae vincunt.” 

“In the absence of light, darkness prevails,” she translates.

“Take a man and steal his religion, then he is a man as God forever intended, a separate and willful being capable of survival and damnation on his own terms.”

“Take an angel,” Alana supplies morosely. “And steal God from him…”

“And you have destroyed the entirety of his world, hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically.”

She breathes at his side, staring blankly at the far wall, dazed.

“Alana, did something happen in Louisiana?”

“What?” Her eyes are lost when she looks at him. “No.”

“Are you certain?”

He will not hold it against her if she lies to him here, as he suspects she will. If Hannibal were someone else, he would mistake her emotion for great empathy or sensitivity of aspect. But he is himself as God also intended, however malevolently. As much as he finds tedious the habit of naming every fateful twist of happenstance as the work of God or of a supposed enemy or of human beings, he has a creeping suspicious that this particular conversation was guided by more than just humans, devils, or angels.

Perhaps more than one human, one devil, and one angel altogether are to blame for this night and for whatever transpires next. He feels he will not be disappointed in any case. He’s sure they’ll have a lot of fun.

“Jack had me evaluate someone they met there; he thinks he’s an angel.”

“And is he?” Hannibal is careful to keep some fair amount of skepticism in his voice and to even it out with gentle support. “You seem convinced of something.”

“He was impossible, Hannibal.” A knit works its way in between her dark eyebrows. She shakes her head disbelievingly. “But he was real.”

Hannibal assesses her in the stilted silence. He can sense that she would like to leave but doesn’t know how to excuse herself now that she has dropped a bombshell on their evening in. He had meant to welcome her back from her brief visit with Jack Crawford, and that intent has not changed now that her return has brought with it even more interesting news than the fact of her safe trip.

“Perhaps a good night’s sleep would further cement your beliefs, whatever they may be.” Genially, he continues, “Now that you are home and freed from the bias of others, you may evaluate and critique your experience more in depth than you could previously.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“Will I see you tomorrow, Dr. Bloom?”

“I think you enjoy seeing me jetlagged,” she jokes lightly.

An upturned corner of her lips tells him she feels grounded enough to go. He tips his chin downward in modest acquiescence. He knows the lines of the face he wears enough to know exactly what that shamefaced expression will look like. He has always been a creature of mirth. He has always known just how to entrance and change another person’s mind with the power of one charged, infectious smile.

Laughter is much the same—contagious, disarming. Alana chuckles in the direction of the hallway before giving him a tired, relaxed smile.

“See me out?”

“Of course.”

He walks her to the foyer, assists her into her coat, and shrugs into his own, accustomed by now to exhausting the most chivalrous of his courtesies to his guests, but especially with Alana Bloom. He gets her car door for her.

“Goodnight, Hannibal.”

She smiles and slides into the driver’s seat. He ducks down slightly to lock eyes with her for the final time tonight. Distantly, he wonders how many more nights like these they will have together, if what he suspects to be true has, in fact, come to pass. His stomach dips with the thought; his eyes savor her open, carefree expression.

He says, “Goodnight, Alana.”

She pulls out of the driveway and disappears down the street, unconcerned for where she has left him or for the memories she has set free in his mind. He sets his coat back in the closet under the stairs and waits.

For several long minutes, he waits not knowing why. Inspiration finds him soon enough.

Alight with curiosity and a floating sense of purpose, he strides into his study and procures his tablet from the desk. He sits back and browses through the News tab on The Times-Picayune going back about a week. Jack Crawford’s Croix Tueur makes an appearance every other article, and he nearly misses the coverage of a supposed meteorite collision at Woldenberg Park.

He searches more about the site of the crater and the preceding lightning storm that dissipated right around the time of impact. Satisfied, he expands his search to La Croix Tueur.

Some sleazy journalists, because they apparently exist in every corner of the world, have become quite dedicated in the pursuit of Jack Crawford and his team. They speak at length, mostly in terms of scathing criticism, about a recent addition to the workforce. They speak about a consultant with glasses and a temporary badge. They speak about a man who seems to have fallen right out of the sky.

None of them detect the irony, unfortunately. As has become the custom, it is left with him.

He scours the internet for a photo and finds not a single candid shot. An inordinate amount of time has left him before he realizes he doesn’t need a photo to discern an identity from obscurity, though he now regrets he hadn’t asked Alana more specific questions.

His suspicion deepens as he reads the consistent address provided by various authors: Special Investigator Will Graham. His hands tremble in anticipation against the smudged screen of his tablet.

He is undeterred by the alias. It has been some time since he relinquished his.

“I wonder if your God would be so accommodating,” he whispers to himself, warm and curious and delighted. “I wonder if He would allow me to break you a second time.”

Hannibal sets down the tablet, temporarily defeated but renewed in the foreign surety of his belief. There is no way he could possibly know the answer to this puzzling riddle, but he so absolutely _does_ that he shakes with it, thrilled and frightened at the same time. The answer sits in the hollow of his throat like a forgotten language summoned first in his muscles rather than recalled explicitly from memory, though he had never forgotten the tune of this particular song. He could never misplace the old twisting of his tongue around a word so quaintly familiar at the very heart of his being.

He would remember, with equal fervor, the precise ways to twist the body that accompanied the old name. He _remembers_ exactly where his tongue was most appreciated.

_Would his face have changed since then?_

While he doesn’t trust his judgment, he is inclined to say no. Charitably, he wonders if, upon falling, the man called _Special Investigator Will Graham_ would have smelled of lush earth and long-extinct atmosphere. He wonders if he would still have had scratches from the brambles that nicked his heels their last morning together when Hannibal, then Ose, had chased him to the water and thrown him in with no malicious intent but to make him scream gleefully with abandon.

His deductive mind can tell him he would have smelled only of cinders and singed tree bark, the telltale odor of lightning. He would have had other wounds to consider than meager scuffs on the surface. His wings would have crumpled sinuously into nothing and left him shivering and mewling in agony.

Hannibal had fallen witness to it once before, with Munkar, the Denied. Nakir, the Denier, had fallen with him, but there had been time only to watch the former’s wither away.

Munkar had screamed for his brother, and Hannibal had paced in between their makeshift graves, listening. Nakir had been the first to fall silent. That was when Munkar became truly hysterical. His panic only kept him alive for so long, unfortunately. Hannibal had supremely enjoyed hearing the refreshing combustibility of the brothers’ Hamito-Semitic tongue. He had been away from the old language for nearly five centuries by that point. Their pleas were nothing if not rejuvenating. 

Hannibal dug them out, of course, once they were quite finished. It would have been rude to leave them as they were, naked, vulnerable, and exposed to the elements. Nakir, as stubborn as Hannibal remembered him to be, had tried to fight him off, but to no avail.

Killing the likes of their kind after the fall is child’s play. It’s something of a tragedy that his star in the darkness is no more than a burnt out ember anymore.

But, as he had told Alana, an angel without God is more of a beast than a man. More than he desires the broken pieces of a once-magnificent vase, he desires to know the exact amount of strain left in the shattered remains of his destroyer angel.

Desire is still desire.

In this different skin, he fancies himself a chameleon. Perhaps he would be recognized and subsequently foiled, but at a high cost to all those involved. He is, forever, as his eternal punishment guarantees, curious.

He takes up the tablet again and searches the Special Investigator one more time, unhindered by doubt or fear of failure. While nothing could really convince him otherwise, he needs to lay eyes on the threat at hand. He needs to observe; needs to _see_ into those eyes he thought he had lost forever.

There is a new article under the crime page, a leaked list of suspects for La Croix Tueur on Jack’s case. The author offers no sources for the information, so Hannibal can’t speak for its credibility. He doesn’t care much if any of it is true. He wants a photo of the Special Investigator, but all he finds are repeated mentions of the name. He swears rhythmically under his breath, initially in Assiutic and then in in Akhmimic, impassioned.

Irritated, he tucks the device back inside its drawer and leans back in his chair.

Bereft of a face, the name— _his_ name—would suffice. He checks his phone; much too late already to ask Alana what the alleged fallen angel had called himself before selecting something more appropriate given the times.

Hannibal doesn’t want to sleep, but he must pass the time somehow. He changes for bed and forces himself to lie still that he might steal at least a few hours before the dawn comes to peel the bruises back from the night sky. Sleep eludes him, so he retreats back into his memory instead. A typed message lies ready to be sent on his phone beside him. For a while he holds onto it, counting down the seconds in his mind until an acceptable hour presents itself. Eventually it lets go of it and keeps his arms down at his sides.

Darkness consumes the room. It matches the darkness of his eyelids, a thick curtain of black containing an incomplete chronicle of the world.

He can see Alexander’s empire growing in the years preceding the Macedonian King’s death. He can see himself walking through the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus a thousand years before the tomb would be reduced to ruins. He can see Tenochtitlan, a golden age of his life that gave him a challenge, a conqueror, and a lover.

 _Well—_ he smiles as he muses— _a challenge and lover._

Perhaps he would have a conqueror this time around. He had lived long enough to be satisfied if an end were in sight.

That isn’t to say he wouldn’t fight the creature of curls and skin and Achilles’ tendons. It may be that he was known now as Hannibal Lecter, but he is still and would always be Ose. Of course he will not go quietly. The real question, he supposes, is whether he will be made to fight at all.

Hannibal will be damned, quite literally, if he will be allowed this near but kept too far away yet to touch. In accordance with some of the less prophetic, more senseless dreams to which he has been privy in the past, he and his old rival, his old captor, will meet again. They will meet again, and Hannibal can hardly stand to wait, though he must.

Eventually, he time comes for him to shower and prepare for his day, so he does. It feels as though a short eternity passes him by just showering and getting dressed, as if he has found himself in a period of rest between lifetimes. He kept himself sane that way over the millennia. Where others had gone mad with the shifting of the times, he would let the time pass him as it does a fox or a tree or a body of water.

The lore denoted him as a man emerged from a leopard. What storytellers omit is the fact of the leopard as a vehicle for reincarnation. Only few before had ever known the secret. Even fewer could understand the practicality of it. So many of his kind, he is sorry to say, devolve into gluttonous imps and thrill seekers the longer they walk the earth.

He shouldn’t speak so flippantly about it, to be fair, though it does take one to know one. He hadn’t always been a cannibal or a murder—those things had come out of an urge constantly ignored, an itch not scratched for far too long. Hannibal prides himself in his indifference to the things humans do to each other, while some of it does manage to confound or attract him. Murder had become one of those things, in practice, that quite enslaved the mind of the poet and the heart of the artist in him.

It takes infinite patience on his part, but he finds himself sitting at work in between patients when lunchtime rolls around. He slips his phone out of his pocket and sends the message off to Alana Bloom after making some minor final corrections. She doesn’t reply straight away. He actually waits through his lunch and through his next patient before his phone lights up with an answer, with _the_ glorious, damnable answer.

Hannibal reads her text through enough times that the small letters begin to blur together in a jumble of black, white, and blue pixels. He stares until his eyes water with the effort. He stares until another text goes through and disturbs his stunned silence.

He reads the second text, from Dr. Du Maurier.

_Confirm appointment on Wednesday?_

Dazed and plagued with a small, incorrigible smile, he types back: _Yes. An old friend of ours has returned._

She replies immediately. His smile widens that much more upon detecting the shift from the doctor, Bedelia, to the comrade, Barbas. He can hear the tilt of an attitude behind her words.

_You’ll have to be more specific than that, Hannibal._

Fighting a tremor deep in the center of him that seems to radiate from his spinal cord outward, he spells the name as it tumbles from his lips in the hushed timber of an incantation. His phone doesn’t allow for the diacritic, to his great frustration.

_Mal’ak ha-Mashhit._

“Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit,” he repeats to himself, testing the name and the decadent onslaught of flashes into the past. “My destroyer,” he murmurs. An old possessive spark flares within him from a profoundly deep place he had previously thought extinguished. “My fallen, golden boy.”

 _Not my friend,_ she writes back. _And not yours either, Hannibal. He is our enemy._

Aware of his denial, he replies, _He is a kicked puppy, thrown out of the only home he knows._

_So your answer is to make yourself his home before he has a chance to turn on you? You are stubborn as ever. He will burn the world you live in before he gives you the chance to be near him a second time. Mark my words._

He slips his phone into his pocket, ignoring that the action perfectly exemplifies the recalcitrance of which she speaks. Idly he rubs his thumb over the back of the phone and thinks.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he takes it out, fully prepared to chastise Barbas for providing him with such gloomy portents. The text alight on his screen, actually, is from Alana. He sinks back into his chair and reads it, finding her unsuspecting innocence a welcome reprieve from the denunciatory sting of one who truly knows him.

She asks, _Have you ever heard of a name like that?_

Smiling, he types back, _It sounds familiar, yes._

His thumb stalls over the send button, and he hesitates before adding, _Might Jack Crawford bring your friend back with him from Louisiana?_

He steals a final glance at his phone screen and secures it in his pocket before letting in his next patient for the day. Mr. Froidevaux follows him into the room and takes a sweeping look around the grand space of the office before extending his hand to Hannibal.

“Dr. Lecter, it’s good to finally meet you.” He beams at Hannibal, eager in his agreeability and starved for some sort of approval. “You came so highly recommended by my prior psychiatrist.”

Hannibal smiles cordially, bowing his head slightly to receive the compliment. Mr. Froidevaux has had several referred psychiatrists before him. He doesn’t suspend his hopes too far that Franklin might make headway with Hannibal where he has failed with so many others. He will try, as is his obligation, but one can only do so much with the allotted resources and circumstances pitting them here together.

“Please, sit.”

Franklin does, and Hannibal’s phone buzzes insistently against his leg. He pretends to be appalled and excuses himself profusely, getting to his feet as he procures the incriminating device.

“Forgive me. I have just come back from lunch and forgot to silence it.”

He glances cursorily at the text before silencing all notification functions. Franklin speaks in his periphery, sharing some banal anecdote from his lunch with a friend.

_I think he might. Why? You want to meet him?_

His blood sings in his skin. The answer is no because he has already, but the answer is also yes for the selfsame reason.

“Tobias just _hates_ shellfish,” Franklin chortles good-naturedly. “Oh, my _God._ That was a great day.”

“Is Tobias a very close friend of yours?” Hannibal returns to his seat and crosses his legs. Franklin leans forward in his chair with his elbows poised on his knees. “Would you like to tell me more about him?”

“There’ll be plenty of time to talk about him, I guess, now that you’re my therapist. Nice, isn’t it? Has a nice feeling to it.” He settles more comfortably in the armchair, and Hannibal knows, immediately, what their problem will be. “I feel good about this.”

“I’m glad.” The standardized, rehearsed lie slips easily through Hannibal’s teeth. “It’s important to find someone you’re comfortable with.”

“Yes, I completely agree.”

Franklin’s eyes glisten, and Hannibal can see, perfectly, that Franklin does, in fact, completely agree. He wills his resolve not to falter and nods his head once.

“Wherever you would like to begin then, we may start there.”

“Probably my mother then,” Franklin surmises with the lilt of a question.

Hannibal waits, and Franklin spins him a tale that dissolves inevitably into old memories and vivid dreamscapes. He listens and absorbs but for the most part is somewhere else entirely, responding to Franklin’s occasional conversational cues purely on autopilot.

He thinks, with an astounding clarity, that much of his life since Tenochtitlan has been lived on autopilot.

The thought, while humbling, makes his heart beat a little bit quicker in his chest. Someone has come who will not let him live his life on autopilot. In a world comprised of blind consumption and desensitization where the only true magnificence he could find after so much colorless monotony, his One had returned.

Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit had returned. Hannibal would have him again—even it meant death for one of both of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Grilled Fava Beans  
> http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Grilled-Fava-Beans
> 
> Foie de Veau en Persillade avec Pommes de Terre  
> http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Calfs-Liver-with-Parsley-Garlic-and-Fried-Potatoes
> 
> Antinori Guado al Tasso 2009  
> http://www.wine.com/v6/Antinori-Guado-al-Tasso-2009/wine/122088/detail.aspx
> 
> Exempli gratia (e.g.) = for the sake of example, id est (i.e.) = that is to say, magna est vis consuetudinis = great is the power of habit.
> 
> White Wine Granita  
> http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/White-Wine-Granita
> 
> “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron
> 
>  _Hamlet_ by Billy Shakes: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
> 
> From Ridley Scott’s _Hannibal_ : “Your job is to craft my doom, so I am not sure how well I should wish you. But I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun.”
> 
> From Bryan Fuller’s _Hannibal_ : “It’s important to find someone you’re comfortable with.”  
> (Hannibal to Freddie Lounds, though maybe that’s not the exact line. I want to credit it anyway, just in case.)
> 
> From Jonathan Demme’s _Silence of the Lambs_ : “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”


	8. The Beast In Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team catches La Croix Tueur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The beast in me/Has had to learn to live with pain/And how to shelter from the rain/And in the twinkling of an eye/Might have to be restrained/God help the beast in me_

Matthew Bennett is _tall._

He’s six feet and seven inches tall. Bennett stands about two full heads higher up from the ground than Lloyd does and he ducks to step under the archways of the three doors Jack walks him through into Interrogation Room #2 with the moss-green door.

Lloyd wants to see the guy run, he’s so tall. What does he even do with his arms?

He thinks he’s still staring when Jack pulls the door shut and turns on him with one unimpressed eyebrow arched way, way high up on his forehead. Will hangs back by the second door they passed through staying out of the way of foot traffic. He stoops down to help one younger police officer when he drops the file he’s carrying all over the hallway.

Jack just looks from the mess of the scattered papers to Lloyd, even more unimpressed if that were possible. Lloyd just sort of half shrugs and thinks about helping the guy with his ruined paper stack. He’s not on of theirs from Quantico; he’s a local guy. He’s all thumbs and exasperated apologies. Will murmurs something to him about NOLA being a murder hub in recent years, though the statistics had been on the decline.

Lloyd wants to tell him that if he’s trying to be reassuring he’s not doing it right, but Jack is still giving him that look like Lloyd should either sprout wings and fly away or be productive and do his job. He doesn’t know what exactly constitutes his job at the moment now that they have a suspect in custody.

“Bennett’s tall,” he says pathetically.

Jack doesn’t frown at him. He just blinks and then pinches the bridge of his nose.

“You’re lucky you’re brilliant with documents, Bowman.”

“I’m employed because I’m brilliant with documents, Jack.” He preens a little. Will stands in his peripheral. “Your text said you found cut spike nails in his garage.”

Jack confirms, “Right by a claw hammer, all worn to hell.”

“So that’s a perfect fit with the first crime scenes then.”

“That’s the idea. Beverly’s testing them now. I’m going to question Bennett.” Jack glances once from Will and the flustered local cop trying not to drop his papers again to Lloyd. He says, “Bowman, I want you to take Will back to the motel and get him settled.”

“I can still be of use here,” the man protests indignantly, speaking up now that he has words. “I slept enough in the hospital.”

Jack gives Bowman a look as if he expects him to argue in his favor, but he just shrugs with an eyebrow arched in question. Part of him, incidentally a very big part, inexplicably wants for Will to have his way here. Ordinarily he wouldn’t voice that kind of opinion in the middle of an investigation with Jack demanding obeisance as part of his job title. Lloyd tries not to break up under Jack’s scrutinizing stare and reminds himself that he’s probably one of Jack’s favorites so he can get away with arguing back a little bit.

He knows Beverly is his true favorite, really, everyone’s true favorite, so he doesn’t press his luck too much.

“Why not let Will watch from behind the glass? If he’s as sharp as I think he is, he could be really helpful telling us whether or not our giant’s telling the truth.”

Jack considers it without shutting him down immediately. It’s a very good sign.

“You stay with him. I’ll take Beverly in with me, and we’ll see what we can get out of him. Show him how the earpieces work. You have five minutes.”

He walks off without a flourish. Will smiles at his retreating back before turning that smile on Lloyd. The sight of at least six of his teeth showing in that open, happy smile alarms and pleases him simultaneously. He grabs his shoulder and gives a conspiratorial squeeze before leading him around to the room where Jack said they could go in to listen.

Grinning he jokes, “The kids have got to stick together or else the parents have all the power.”

Perplexed, Will asks, “Do you consider Jack your father?”

It’s only a moment before Beverly breezes in with earpieces for them both, at which Lloyd marvels for a good few seconds before taking his. He’s surprised Jack requested one for him as well.

“You just talk like normal, and we’ll hear you over there, okay?”

She warns him about not hitting the glass to get their attention because it will alarm the suspect. Lloyd doesn’t say anything about the time she had to keep him from tapping on the glass back at home because he got distracted for a minute and forgot they were conducting the interview in real time with a real live suspect. He shrugs when Beverly glances his way once.

“Jack said he’d need another minute just to double check financial records. He’s looking into all the times Bennett visited hardware stores in the past few months.”

“Sounds like hardcore sleuthing,” he muses and nods his head.

Beverly hums.

She says, “Hardcore Sleuth is Jack’s middle name.”

“It’s Laurence, actually,” Will murmurs, turning his earpiece over in his fingers.

He turns to look at the door the second Jack comes bursting through it, maybe even a few seconds before. He just angles his head to one side for Beverly to follow him out into the hall, and they go without any further words.

Lloyd tucks his earpiece into place so that Will can see and follow his example. They stand for a few minutes in silence, watching Jack and Beverly question Matthew Bennett, whose face reveals nothing and whose body language is even less responsive to interrogation. Lloyd rubs at his forehead with the heel of his hand after about ten minutes of a stone-faced suspect, a stoically silent Will Graham nee ha-mashḥit, and an increasingly irritated Jack Crawford.

They’re about to wrap up their lines of inquiry, resigned to just wait for the lawyer to show up and shoo them out of the room, when Will’s back stiffens and Lloyd hears his teeth click in his mouth.

Matthew Bennett confesses to killing Ila and Bertrand Sauveterre.

He licks his lips and leans his elbows on the metal table separating him from Jack and Beverly, the former wearing a vaguely pleased expression and the latter looking only minutely shocked at the confession. Lloyd looks at Will and he’s furrowing his eyebrows together the way Lloyd does when his brother-in-law asks him for help studying on his stats final at the community college in Woodbridge and his brain starts to go offline.

Matthew Bennett doesn’t get two words out about how he never meant to hurt the Sauveterres when Will says, with steel in his voice that Lloyd’s never heard before, “He’s lying.”

Jack’s victorious expression droops and becomes a frown. Beverly’s eyes flick toward where they stand hidden behind the glass. Lloyd whispers for him to explain how he knows.

“The short version,” he clarifies just to be sure.

Will looks at him uncertainly and then back at Bennett behind the glass. He stays quiet. Bennett gives a clipped rendition of what Will told them happened at the Sauveterre residence in about as much detail. Will shakes his head to himself as he goes on, and Lloyd alerts to the calm in Bennett’s face. It’s the pacification of a man prepared for his last walk.

“Ask him about his girlfriend.”

Lloyd turns on him, confused.

“How do you know he has a girlfriend?”

“He never would have picked that watch for himself, and the ring on his right hand is an engagement ring; someone he’s serious about but who he hasn’t or won’t marry for whatever reason.”

“Lots of people wear rings. How do you know the watch didn’t come from his mother?”

“She’s been dead for six years, and that watch is only a year old if that.”

Jack clears his throat on the other side of the glass.

Confidentially Will says, “The girlfriend, Jack.”

“In light of your confession, Mr. Bennett, we’ll be keeping you here for booking. You’ll want to call someone. Maybe your lawyer.”

“Or your girlfriend,” Beverly chips in, gaze honed in on the ring Will mentioned. “You do have a girlfriend, don’t you? You wouldn’t want her to find out through the press that her fiancé is a serial killer. Word does travel fast.”

They wait and Lloyd can see Bennett’s hands clutching nervously at the hem of his shirt.

Jack turns to Beverly as if discovering something.

“You know, those receipts from the hardware store, there was a pattern to the timestamps.” He looks back at Bennett. “All of them in the middle of the week during your business hours at the garage.”

“Is that true, about the receipts?” Will looks at Lloyd who shrugs. “Can he do that?”

Jack keeps talking, so Lloyd lets that stand for him in lieu of giving a proper answer. Will appears visibly distressed at the dishonesty.

He spins a quick story about the purchases and asks if Bennett even needed cut spike nails for anything around the house since it was a veritable shambles in the middle of its neighborhood, something of an eyesore, really. He says it’s a likely story that they would want to renovate but that it’s not entirely believable seeing as they’d only really bought small supplies of nails or twine here and there and hadn’t taken any real steps to modify the house.

Bennett bites his lip and doesn’t speak. Will Graham doesn’t move at Lloyd’s shoulder but still manages to give the strange impression that he does. Lloyd alternates between watching Will and watching Bennett’s confession unravel. When asked how he knows the Sauveterres he has to tell them how Ila Sauveterre nee Vipond went to school with Lottie, his live-in girlfriend of three years.

Jack asks how tall Lottie is, and he doesn’t answer.

Beverly tells him Bertrand Sauveterre was stabbed in the back at such a way that suggests Bennett may be too tall to have done it comfortably. She says the angle would have been awkward at his height. Lloyd perks up a bit.

“I don’t think _that’s_ a lie.”

He thinks he sees the ghost of a smile flicker across her face just as Matthew Bennett’s composure seems to waver.

“How tall had your initial guess been, Beverly? Based on the physical evidence?”

“Five six at the most.” She turns a critical eye on Bennett where he squirms in his chair. “But I wasn’t guessing.”

“I killed them,” he protests weakly, voice nowhere near as stern as it was when he confessed the first time. “I did it. It was me. I killed all those people.”

“They would have realized he didn’t do it,” Will remarks quietly to Lloyd, pulling the earpiece out of his ear and disregarding the rest of their conversation with a shaky Matthew Bennett.

Lloyd removes his, too, as they can still hear what’s going on in the next room even without the earpieces.

“That’s true.” He nods his head once. “But even if the evidence spells out the answer for us, sometimes it isn’t enough until the guilty party confirms or denies it.”

“You would’ve let an innocent man go to jail for another person’s crimes?”

“It happens sometimes.” Lloyd frowns at having to admit it. “The evidence can be deceiving, just like people can be.”

“The evidence is all there,” he argues, impassioned. “You just have to see the right version of it.”

Lloyd rocks back on his heels and fiddles with the earpiece in his palm.

“Maybe you’re here to make sure we do that then.” He shrugs when Will turns a critical eye on him. “It’d be a noble as calling as any.”

“I don’t have a calling anymore.”

He turns to the glass as Jack and Beverly file out of the room. Matthew Bennett drops his face into his hands and slouches over the table, shoulders bunched up and shaking.

“And nothing about death is noble,” he adds for good measure just before Beverly comes to collect them and their earpieces. Jack goes about issuing a search for Charlotte Tasse, rousing Price and Zeller from their places cooped up in a backroom with evidence files.

Lloyd doesn’t argue when Jack tells him to take Will back to the motel this time. Neither does Will.

He gets Will checked in to a room on the second floor just above his. He ducks into the bathroom and drops off a bag with essential toiletries he picked up back when Jack first agreed to take him on as soon as he could leave the hospital. Beverly had told him the man had zero earthly possessions apart from the clothes on his back. Lloyd figures a toothbrush is as good a place as any to start. At the store he had warred with himself and stared down a Superman toothbrush for about twenty minutes before deciding a simple blue one would be more appropriate given Will’s apparent age.

Not that it was a big deal, like a _winter jacket_ or anything. He sniffs and gingerly tucks the blue plastic toothbrush away in the medicine cabinet. It’s really no wonder Beverly is everyone’s favorite.

Will is standing on the bed toeing at the bedspread with his socked foot when Lloyd emerges from the bathroom. He isn’t in the right state of mind to handle breaking it to a fully grown man that he can’t jump on the bed because of this social norm or that one, so he just stares blankly for a good minute while Will stares back at him. He thinks of his nephew, not yet out of the little-boy-stage bouncing on the bed after a particularly long, boring day of elementary school and he smiles.

The man calling himself Will Graham is more than a man but somehow less than a child. He doesn’t know how else to phrase it than with illogical paradoxes. Will Graham is an illogical paradox in and of himself.

“Why are you like this?”

Lloyd gestures vaguely to the full form his grown man’s body, not asking about personality traits or curiosity or the occasional bouts of telepathy. Will shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

“Why was I made in this shape?”

“Yeah.”

He takes a knee before folding his legs under himself and sitting like a child. He bounces slightly with the suddenness of the action. Lloyd just continues to smile and sits in the chair against the wall just across from the bathroom.

“I believe the goal was for me to look different.”

“In Tenochtitlan,” Lloyd fills in for him. Will tips his chin in the affirmative. “You looked just like this back then?”

“Yes.”

“Will you always look like this?”

“No.”

“You’ll age.”

“In time.” Will flexes his toes and then bends his feet forward at the ankles before arching them back. “Just as you do.”

Lloyd’s fingers twitch in response to watching Will’s limbs go. One of his knuckles pops and an embarrassed flush spreads up the back of his neck.

“Are you hungry at all?”

Will says no.

“Are you hungry for chocolate,” he amends, remembering Beverly’s story about his enthusiastic love for Snickers candy bars.

He huffs a laugh when Will absentmindedly licks his lips.

Lloyd makes a quick trip to the vending machine downstairs and gets a Twix for himself and a Snickers for Will. He tosses him the chocolate and settles into his chair again. Will gives him a curious look and asks if Jack will need his assistance looking for Tasse.

“I think he wants me here making sure you don’t go wandering off into a snowdrift somewhere.”

“In Louisiana,” Will deadpans.

“You fell out of the sky, man. Don’t tell me what’s impossible.”

Will scrunches his nose anyway, palpably offended.

“I don’t need to be babied.”

“Did I give you the impression I was babying you?” Lloyd asks with some innocence, but only just. “I don’t feed chocolate to babies, or to small children. That is a definite no-no.”

He’d done it once or twice, and once or twice was enough times to learn that he should not do it anymore. He loves his nephew, bless Henry’s hyperactive heart, but chocolate—sugar of any kind, really—was not something that would happen ever again outside of Easter and his birthday. Thank you very much.

Will takes a bite out of his chocolate, an entertained glint in his blue—blue? Or were they green?—eyes.

“You didn’t answer my question completely.”

“No?”

“Why were you supposed to look different? Why were you supposed to look like this and not like, you know, a scholar or something?”

Will purses his lips, something he does to convey speechless confusion. He doesn’t understand that Lloyd is trying to tell him that he’s handsome and that he looks like he could probably run a mile easily, and not just because he’s still technically angelic.

“I mean, you weren’t _born,_ were you? You just _happened_ this way? You don’t have an actual genetic code or inherited traits. Do you?” He glances ostentatiously as Will’s stomach, trying to discern whether a belly button exists under the clothes. He pauses and averts his eyes. “If I’m being rude you can tell me. I tend not to have a filter when I’m trying to learn about things. So stop me if I need to be stopped, okay?”

“Are you asking if there’s a reason that I have the face and the body that I do?”

“Well, yeah. And I’m also very curious about the state of your navel.”

“I have a belly button, though it’s purely ornamental; not a true scar indicating past experience.”

“In this case, a birth.”

“Correct.” Will pats at his stomach leisurely. “People, I think, would shun a person without an umbilicus.”

“Of course, you’re right.” Lloyd nods as if this is something that is common knowledge because it actually does make a lot of sense. “And I guess this physique would have helped you in that climate.”

Will looks down at himself, wearing a watered down version of Jack’s unimpressed expression.

“I suppose it would have. Since you mention it, I do wonder if I wasn’t designed this way so as to be appealing to the one I hunted, Ose.”

Lloyd hums at the familiar name. Zeller had said something about an Ose to Beverly the previous day. She had teased him when he called Ose a “she” and then proceeded to blush about the mistake relentlessly for the next ten minutes. Price added something about a jaguar, to which Zeller corrected him by saying, “Wrong type of panther” and then things went back to normal.

“So then, this is a love story after all?”

Will laughs, a bitter enough edge to it that Lloyd makes a note not to joke about it again.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” he says dismissively. “Or, well…” His eyes find a distant point to stare at. “I never thought it was.”

“You think he might have been your,” Lloyd starts to say before trailing off. He doesn’t want to say _soul mate_ to a newly damned being.

Because that’s what mortality means, doesn’t it? That he’ll sin and want and wound just like the rest of them.

“My?”

Will squints at him and takes a bite of his candy, occupying his frown for the moment. Lloyd is almost certain he at least heard the words he didn’t say, even if maybe he doesn’t understand them, which turns out to be the truth. Will deposits his empty candy wrapper into the trash bin under the bedside table, straightens out with his legs tucked back under himself, and asks what the hell a soul male is.

He doesn’t say, _what the hell is a soul mate,_ but that’s the tone his voice takes on.

And really it was a poor choice of words anyway because he shouldn’t have just assumed Will meant anything like a soul mate just because he hinted that there was some kind of romantic interplay between him and this proclaimed demon-panther-humanoid-creature called Ose.

Lloyd’s heard too much about the dangers of assumptions from Jack to really be forgiven his intuitive leap.

_U and me, indeed,_ he thinks miserably, trying to conceive of a way to simultaneously explain what the hell a soul mate is and why he thought Ose could or would have been Will’s back when the world only knew him by Mal’ak ha-mashḥit and Will Graham hadn’t existed yet.

“It’s just, well, he must have been really something to have ensnared you and taken you off the course the way he did, I mean, you were sent for a reason, right? No one else could ever get him, but even you were lured in, so I just thought maybe there was a reason for that, and it seemed okay to credit your, what sounds like mutual, fixation toward something really significant like a soul mate. It really only refers to a person who makes you whole; it doesn’t mean you’re all cutesy in love or anything.

“It’s not always a good thing either, even if it sounds like a really sweet deal; sometimes you can fall for someone who’s really bad for you and who makes you a bad person by association, or I think it can happen that way sometimes, you know, or I guess you wouldn’t, would you?

“I do know, though. Sometimes certain people, even when they’re the whole world to you, they can be really toxic and drag you down to their level, even if they’re not always bad. And I only say this because maybe you’ll say that this Ose-leopard-guy can’t be your soul mate because he isn’t good or because fraternization with him isn’t allowed, but that’s the exact opposite of a reason for not falling in love with someone or wanting to be with them.

“But you probably know a _little_ bit about it, don’t you? How could you know so much about people and not know anything about soul mates or what it feels like to think someone could be yours—?”

Lloyd snaps his mouth shut, chagrined for his absolute lack of tact for words. He only realizes he’s spoken entirely too much when he has to draw in a second full breath to continue his lengthy, probably horribly inadequate explanation. Really, Beverly would have been so much better.

Will has a wonderfully blank expression on his face, which hopefully means he isn’t too insulted at the suggestion that his soul mate might be a literal demon.

“A soul mate,” he tests the word.

“It just seems like sometimes you can catch more flies with honey.”

“What does that mean?” Will asks uncertainly.

“Maybe you were made to fall from grace and into his arms.” And God, he hates how did-it-hurt-when-you-fell-from-heaven that sounds, but Will doesn’t appear to notice how lame the statement is on its own. Rather, he just looks perfectly confounded at the possibility that he could have been created only to be doomed. Lightly, Lloyd tells him, “Welcome to humanity.”

That earns him a small glare, though there isn’t much heat behind it.

“At least that means I’ll die someday,” Will grumbles.

Lloyd gets the feeling he means it and not in an entirely morbid way. He’s relieved. There’s an end in sight. He’ll get to finish soon.

He remembers being dragged along with Daisy to the Bingo with their grandparents when they were kids. He used to tell her on every drive there that it would be over before they knew it and they’d be back home in no time. He stops and thinks about time and how much of it ticked down while they were looking the other way and counting sunsets and first dates and railroad tracks instead of minutes, hours, and days.

To Will Graham nee ha-Mashḥit he says, “It’ll go by in a blink” because it does.

And the twice earth-bound angel studies him for a few quiet moments before replying, “Yes, it will.”

They sit there in joint deep thought until Lloyd’s contemplation is interrupted by Will’s hands thumping mutedly on the comforter of the bed. He looks up at him and asks why the hell he was standing on the bed earlier.

He doesn’t say, _why the hell were you standing on the bed earlier,_ but that’s basically the implication of his tone.

“I wondered if my head would touch the ceiling,” he answers with a straight face and eyes that are much too innocent but all-seeing for their own damned good.

“Trying to see through Matthew Bennett’s eyes?”

Lloyd stands up when Will does and bites back a smile when Will goes to stand on the bed again. His hair just barely grazes the ceiling, but his head doesn’t quite clear it.

“I was trying to see if things looked different from up here.”

“And do they?”

“Yes,” Will says, a strange softness creeping into his voice. “It reminds me how much smaller I’ve become.”

“You feel small up there?”

“Do you feel small down there?”

“I feel normal-sized,” Lloyd starts, trying to anticipate where Will is going with this. “You look normal-sized.”

“Great height can be imposing,” Will muses, eyes glossing over and taking him somewhere farther into himself while Lloyd just stares. “But they can be conquered by someone who knows the way.”

“Are you still talking about Bennett, or are you talking about mountains because…”

“Lottie Tasse, Beverly said she was probably about 5’6”; is that about average for a woman?”

“Some might consider it tall?” Lloyd frowns when Will continues to look off at a spot on the wall that he can’t see. “What are you thinking?”

“It looked like more than devoted affection when he confessed to her crimes, especially afterward.” He opens his eyes, though they weren’t technically closed before, and directs a calculating look at Lloyd. “He looked afraid.”

“Well, we’d just caught him trying to cover for his murderer of a girlfriend, so he knows he’ll have to atone for that. He also nearly went to jail for some really serious stuff, Will, I mean…take your pick of what he’s scared of. Yeah, I imagine his girlfriend will probably want to go after him now that she thinks he turned her in.”

Will continues to watch him. The answer must be right there in front of his face.

He takes a guess. “Do you think she’ll go after him?”

“He looked fierce only because she gave him permission to be.” Will frowns, eyes going in and out of focus as he chases after the idea forming on the very edges of his mind. “She won’t be expecting his betrayal, but she’ll assume immediately that he did it.”

Will ambles off the bed and goes looking for his shoes. He has one arm in his jacket when Lloyd’s phone buzzes with a text.

“They’ve got Tasse. They’re taking her into the station. Jack wants me there for the interrogation.”

He is about to instruct Will as to how the locks on the doors work and what the best way to de-wrinkle a dollar bill for a vending machine is when Will lifts his chin just a little and says, “I’m going with you.”

And Lloyd sighs and doesn’t argue because hey, it worked out okay last time, didn’t it?

So they go back to the station and they get there only a few minutes before Jack and the rest of the team do. Beverly walks in first to hold the door for Jack and Charlotte Tasse done up in handcuffs and a rumpled dress. She’s thin, maybe on the malnourished side but with a wiry strength to her that says she could have it in her to kill people. She doesn’t look like she could have hung them up all by herself, though—not without the added muscle of one Matthew Bennett, all six feet and seven inches of him. Jack hands her off to another officer and disappears into a farther off corridor with the two of them.

Zeller and Price have remained out in the parking lot fumbling with samples they collected onsite and stored in clunky black trunks, so Will walks out to help them cart it all in. Lloyd lags behind to speak to Beverly of what Will said to him about Tasse’s possible violence.

“Will thinks she might try to get to Bennett. He’s still in lock-up, right?”

“Yeah,” Beverly confirms for him. “He hasn’t requested to be let out and he hasn’t made any phone calls. No lawyer either.”

“Does he want one?”

“If he does he hasn’t said so. Matter of fact, he hasn’t said anything since we left him to go get Tasse. I’d be worried he’d hurt himself if he wasn’t handcuffed to the table.”

Lloyd nods his head and watches Will carrying one of the bigger trunks in with the ease of a conditioned weight lifter. Zeller follows inside after him and mutters, “I totally had it.”

“Sure you did,” Price teases. “Because that case _never_ gives you problems.”

“Excuse you. I am _robust_ and in my prime.”

“He’s right, Zeller,” Lloyd hears Will answer over his shoulder. “You always stretch your shoulder carrying this trunk.”

“Thank you, Angel boy,” Zeller mumbles sarcastically.

Four gunshots pierce through the subdued murmur of the station, and somewhere a woman screams and a man shouts. Lloyd can’t get around Price or Zeller in time to stop Will from dropping the black trunk and running in a dead sprint for Matthew Bennett. Beverly manages to slip around them and chase him as far as the hall before the willowy figure of Charlotte Tasse darts in front of her and stops her with a gun pointed carelessly, fucking carelessly, right in her face.

She must have seen him from the window in the door when they walked her in because she goes straight for it, sweeping the gun one way and then the other as he walks herself backwards. She tries the handle for Interrogation Room #2 with the moss-green door, and when it won’t twist all the way and let her in she turns and fires at it twice. When she tries it again the door opens.

Ray Blanchard, chief of the NOPD, shouts with his and a dozen of his officers’ guns drawn, “Charlotte Tasse.”

Tasse barely even looks at him. Her gun is trained halfway in between Blanchard and one of his younger officers who is, Lloyd realizes, the same one that dropped the papers earlier in the hall. He can tell that his eyes aren’t on Tasse or his commanding officer either but on Will where they can all see him through the busted in door using himself as a human shield over Matthew Bennett, still cuffed to the table.

“You had one job to do, Matt,” she says, alternatingly in between pointing her gun more accurately at the wall of police lined up behind her and leering at Matthew Bennett through Will.

“I didn’t do anything, Lottie, I swear it. I didn’t do—”

“Shut up,” she mutters, not even having to raise her voice to silence him so complete is her control over him. “Move away, so I can shoot him.” She says it to Will, but because she keeps changing the direction of her voice it seems as though she’s telling them all. There’s a smile on her face, wide and mischievous, and a glint in her eyes, dangerous and unchecked. “You’ll kill him anyway, all that stuff I made him do.”

Her low laugh sends a chill up Lloyd’s spine.

“Did he help you with the Sauveterres?”

Everyone turns to look at Will when his voice rises up from the short, terse silence. Even Charlotte Tasse forgets temporarily that her attention must be divided.

“Was he there when you killed them?”

Lloyd sees her lick her lips when she turns to point the gun directly at Chief Blanchard before backing further into the room after confirming for herself, perhaps, that Will is unarmed.

“That was an unfortunate accident, what happened to Rand and Ila.”

“I know,” Will answers, stepping around the table but remaining in the way of a clear shot to Matthew Bennett. “It got out of your control, and you had to stop them from making it worse. They were going to ruin everything.”

A few of Blanchard’s officers start to advance and she whirls about at the sound of their approaching footsteps. She fires the gun off at their feet, and they back up instantly. 

Will surprises them all once more by speaking.

“Who was Jennifer?”

And Lloyd can just tell by the way her shoulders stiffen up and her eyes go wide and shiny that one of two things will happen next: either Tasse will drop the gun and cry, or she will turn and shoot Will as many times as she needs to in order to get to Matthew Bennett.

She does the latter, but she only gets one shot off before at least four other officers, already drawn and poised to pull the trigger, return the favor and swiftly disarm her. Beverly rushes into the room as soon as Tasse, screaming and fully enraged now, has been extracted by two large police officers from the doorway. Lloyd follows in after Jack with Chief Blanchard, Zeller, Price, and the young officer with the clumsy hands hot on his heels.

Will’s curled in on himself around the legs of Bennett’s chair, sputtering and clamping a hand down over the red spouting mess of his chest. Someone, maybe Zeller, is speaking on the phone to a 9-1-1 operator. Beverly crouches down at his side and uses her jacket to try and staunch the blood flow.

Lloyd hears Bennett whimpering Tasse’s words to himself: “Move away, so I can shoot him.”

A terrified falling feeling starts up inside him when he hears Will complete the echo by rasping, through full-body spasms and through red-stained teeth gritted painfully together with his eyes pinched shut, “You’ll kill him anyway, all that stuff I made him do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really sorry about everything taking forever to update, guys. Since you last saw me on either this story or SftD, I've had finals, the holiday fic exchange, the holidays themselves, and other things and stuff, so I apologize.
> 
> I'm planning on updating more frequently now that things are looking like they'll be less crazy for a while. And no, I will not be abandoning either this story or SftD. Don't even worry about it.
> 
> Anyway, that's all. You'll hear more from me soon.


	9. God's Gonna Cut You Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not all detectives carry badges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Sooner or later God'll cut you down/Well, you may throw your rock and hide your hand/Workin' in the dark against your fellow man/But as sure as God made black and white/What's done in the dark will be brought to the light_

It isn’t difficult to follow the news in another state. One could learn the economic situation of any country overseas with a few clicks of a button. So keeping up with Jack Crawford while his team uncovers a serial killer is child’s play.

Freddie’s kept one eye trained on Crawford since that trainee of his, Miriam Lass, went missing. She figures for all that he looks cool and sturdy on the outside, the man’s just a few missteps shy of a massive train wreck. She aims to be there when the chips fall. Someone will need to take down the story, and if it’s going to be anyone, it should be her.

She’d have their respect then, the other journalists like her who looked down on her methods. She would be reputable then; a force to be reckoned with.

The latest news in their case, that of _La Croix Tueur_ , reads open and shut. Local reporters mostly emphasize the apprehended killer and the relief expressed by the people of New Orleans. There are several interviews conducted with a former suspect named Cyril Lécuyer but only a few with the police chief Blanchard and even fewer with Jack Crawford. Their official statements are brief, undetailed; the bare minimum that needs to be shared with the public. She scowls at the blatant censorship and skim their statements anyway, unyielding as she knows they will be.

Resigned to their fastidious coordination of the facts, she reads over Lécuyer’s more extensive conversations with the press. Lécuyer is not in league with Crawford or Blanchard. He is only in league with himself; he’s exactly the kind of man Freddie would be speaking to if this case hadn’t taken them off her turf.

For a while all he does is gloat about the FBI’s interest in him for the credit of the murders. In a few of the articles he singles out one specific agent named Brian Zeller as having a personal vendetta against the man, which is probably his ego going to work more than it is concrete evidence. Freddie reads along anyway, stopping only when Lécuyer mentions the freak lightning storm that hit the same night the second to last cluster of murders was discovered.

She reads the smaller words attributed to him. His photograph adorns the bare spot beneath the block quote.

“It was like a sign from God…to leave me alone because I’m innocent and [the police] don’t have anything to use against me.”

She pauses for a moment to frown at the alterations to the text, knowing full well it’s something she does in her own writing but hating that she can’t hear his words in her mind exactly as he said them. It’s an inconvenience is all.

“They listened, too, because after that night I didn’t get any calls or visits from the FBI or [police chief Blanchard]. It just goes to show God’ll take care of you when you can’t take care of yourself. It’s like he—no, really?” She cuts herself off to sigh at his last remarks. “It’s like an angel got sent down to look after you, really, that’s what you’re going with?”

She closes out of the window and ruffles her hair, disgruntled but curious all the same. She opens another tab on the Times Picayune to look into the weather going back to the night Lécuyer said it happened.

“Possible meteorite crater near Woldenberg Park,” she muses, scanning the slew of article titles.

Maybe it was crass of her to discount the man’s beliefs so quickly, but it’s nothing she hasn’t heard before. People often credit small miracles to this deity or that one; use their salvation to glorify this faith or the other. She could be forgiven, honestly, for her disillusionment with it all. On a good day she might consider agnostics open-minded.

But to be fair, she had been raised Catholic, so it wasn’t as if she didn’t know all the tricks.

She’d read of the river waters to blood, the staffs turned to serpents, and of the demon-infested man who was cleansed as the legion was driven into a herd of pigs. She’d memorized Genesis as a girl, and so the intervention of angels was not an entirely foreign concept to her; she had read of Abraham and Isaac. Freddie had also read of Lot and his daughters, the corruption of Sodom and Gomorrah, the fall of man, and the wrathful flood that massacred a world.

She had read all her life, so it came as no surprise that her calling would be to write stories as big and horrific as the ones she grew up with.

Angels.

There had been something about a consultant on the case, soon after the lightning storm. No one had covered it to her satisfaction, so she hadn’t learned enough about the man whose identity had been the best kept secret in the investigation to date.

She knew Lottie Tasse and her accomplice Matthew Bennett; she knew all about the verbal abuse to which she submitted him; she knew to whole sordid story of Jennifer Sauveterre, the daughter Lottie had attempted to mother for the barren couple.

But she didn’t know the man’s name, and no one had snapped so much as a photograph. Maybe Lécuyer had been talking about him, the mysterious, unidentified consultant, when he said an angel had been sent down to protect him—not literally, of course, but maybe he was the reason the police didn’t arrest him at the first sign of possible guilt.

It would be worth her time and efforts to find out the man’s identity, if only to be forewarned of his continued assistance with the FBI. She has no idea if the consultation could extend to that type of working relationship, but if it does, she will be the first to know.

She reads through more of the articles from just last night and can’t find anything beyond a report of shots being fired at the station where Tasse attempted to kill Bennett before they could both be imprisoned. There’s no name given there either, but only one man is consistently mentioned as being injured onsite. She has a gut feeling that it’s none other than Lécuyer’s nameless _angel._

She searches hospital records for recent patients with gunshot wounds, typing in the keywords she had been taught to use. No one ever has to know how she comes about this information, so it’s a small thing to just hack the servers.

No one has to know about that skill of hers either.

There have been several patients admitted since the shooting with a GSW to any one or multiple parts of the body, which shouldn’t surprise her, really, but that does make things a bit more tedious. She’s not quite advanced enough with computers that she can search beyond the very basics, so she modifies her search by a hair each time, trying to find a discrepancy where surely one has to exist.

Her results aren’t forthcoming in the slightest, as all she can get are names and physical conditions. Some of them have long lists of previous illnesses or visits, some of them have nothing at all, and some of them have DNRs, which is interesting but not really helpful to her cause.

She runs their names through a search engine and finds them on social networking sites, the few of them who have accounts to speak of. Half of the twelve don’t, so she writes their names down on index cards and sets them aside.

The six she finds online, she digs up what she can about their careers. Three of them work in retail, one of them is a teenager, and the other two are retired, one from the police force and the other from the military. She leaves the two retirees but then discards the navy veteran for his old age, though she marks his card with a star, just in case she’d dismissed Randall Tolbert too soon.

Of the other six, one of them is an art student at Loyola University. Another is a chef at Antoine’s Restaurant. The third is Lottie Tasse herself.

Freddie sets all of their names in the discard pile, leaving Tolbert’s name at the top of the stack.

The three names remaining she can’t find anything on them anywhere; no profiles, no service records, nothing. She can only see names, ages, and injuries, which don’t tell her anything right away. They are all of what she would deem an acceptable age, and they have all three of them been shot.

Hal Bradford is forty seven with a GSW to the leg, which could have been an attempt on Lottie Tasse’s part to demobilize him. He last visited the hospital in 2005 when he broke his arm falling off a roof. She puts him in the discard pile with a star beside his name. His one redeeming factor is that it might not be enough of a reason for her to discount him that he took a dive off a rooftop blind drunk one New Year’s Eve at a party. She eyes the penned star and crosses it out, deciding that even if Jack Crawford doesn’t know about that injury, it wouldn’t be like him to work with someone so careless.

Caroline Charbonneau was admitted with a GSW to the shoulder. She is twenty five and has no previous admittances to the hospital. A note has been made in the margin of previous hairline fractures that hadn’t been properly treated at the time of injury. The nurse’s initials read B.D.; there is mention of possible physical abuse in Charbonneau’s childhood but nothing else. B. Derouen, the nurse whose notes Freddie is currently reading, raised the issue with a detective of the same last name and recommended an investigation into the woman’s legal guardians since she wouldn’t say who it was that had shot her.

Freddie places the woman’s name into the discard pile but makes a note of Bartholomew and Philant Derouen’s possible relation for later. She can’t say yet whether their tie could be beneficial to her, but she likes to think that it will be.

The last of the three is a patient called Will Graham, GSW to the chest. His age is given as mid to late thirties, and records from his previous visit tell her he has 20/40 vision. She checks the initial report when he was admitted with lesions and electric shock. It happened the same night of the freak lightning storm that Lécuyer referenced in his interview.

Bartholomew Derouen wrote up Will Graham’s notes, too. The doctor listed on-file is a Munashe Archambault.

From what she can see the man has no known relatives, no history of formal education, and no current occupation. It’s almost as if he fell right out of the sky and into Jack Crawford’s hands.

Really, how else does someone with virtually no past end up shot. At least with the other patients she could piece together some of the logic behind their injuries; the reckless drunk, the abused girl refusing to file charges, the retired cop, and the navy veteran getting on in his years.

“So Will Graham,” she tests the name, liking the lush sound of it. _Miriam Lass_ had a soft ring to it, too. “He’s gotten you into a whole lot of trouble, hasn’t he?”

Inspired, Freddie looks in the directory for Bartholomew Derouen’s contact information. It’s not available to the public, so rather than exhaust the full extent of her grasp on technology, she settles for calling the front desk of Interim LSU. She figures it will be a quicker route going through the nurse than it would be going through the detective.

A woman answers her call on the fourth ring sounding out of breath. There’s a commotion going on in the background that could be more chaotic but that hopefully will serve as enough of a smokescreen to mask her intentions. As it is Freddie missed her first name. The last name might have been Ingram.

“Hi, I’m looking for someone. Do you have a patient in your hospital by the name of Will Graham?”

“What is your name?” Nurse Ingram asks in such a tone as to suggest that Freddie may have already said it but that she missed it because of all the noise going on in the background.

“It’s Gwendolyn Roscoe,” she lies easily, knowing Jack Crawford will intercept the call if he suspects it is her.

Gwendolyn sounds different enough from Wendell that she doesn’t worry they’ll trace the alias back to the real Roscoe who’s carried a torch for her since college. If Crawford does manage to connect him to it, she has no doubt that Wendell would forgive her if it happened. More importantly, it wouldn’t do well for him if it came to light that he was the one who’d taught her everything she knows about computers.

Ingram asks, “What is your relationship to the patient?”

Well, shit.

“I’m not related.” It would be too flimsy of a lie without a carefully contrived cover story. Quickly she adds, “Will doesn’t have any family, but we’re friends. He went missing about a month ago.”

That seems to get her attention, that Freddie knew the man Will Graham had no immediate family documented anywhere. She scours the current windows she has open for something more to work with, careful not to type for the sound it would make.

Freddie says, “He grew up in Metairie, so I’ve been calling around to every hospital within a ten mile radius trying to find him.” She tries for desperation when she speaks again after a short pause: “I know you can’t give me his information, but I just want to know if something’s happened to him and if he’s all right.”

She huffs a nervous little breath, purely for show. It’s practically audible, the woman’s hesitation.

“He was admitted a few days ago with a gunshot wound.”

Freddie gasps out, hopefully not too dramatic, “Oh, my God.”

Ingram rushes to add, “As of this morning he’s in critical condition. According to his file he’s been here at least a week if not much longer. Where did you say you’re from?”

Freddie carefully refrains from mentioning that she didn’t say.

“Baltimore.”

“Well, then he’s a long way from home.”

“Thank you. I just…it’s such a relief to get some news about where he’s been. Thank you so much.”

“I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything more specific about his condition.”

She sounds more put out than sorry. Freddie doesn’t blame her.

“W-wait! Isn’t there going to be an _investigation?_ I read all about a _serial killer_ being on the loose, and the police wouldn’t release the names of the victims. I was just so worried he’d gotten hurt and now you’re telling me he has, and are the police even _looking_ for whoever did it?”

“Ma’am, I can’t—”

Someone else’s voice picks up in the background.

_“Saskia, what’s wrong?”_

Saskia answers, _“This woman says she knows Will Graham.”_

_“Here.”_

She hands the phone off.

“Barry Derouen,” he announces for her sake. “With whom am I speaking?”

“Gwendolyn Roscoe,” Freddie replies easily, already perfectly in step with this charade she has created. “I’m Will’s friend. He’s been missing for nearly a month now. Your co-worker said he’s at your hospital.”

“I can’t give you information about our patients, Miss Roscoe. If you are who you say you are, then you can come down and get him when he’s good to be released.”

“I just wanted to know if there was going to be an investigation. Nurse Ingram said he was _shot_ and in _critical condition_.”

She hopes she doesn’t cost Saskia Ingram her job for this, but it would serve her in the future to be more diligent about this sort of thing. Every lesson needs to be learned one way or another. Freddie tells herself she doesn’t care what the consequences will be; she tells herself Saskia Ingram should have known better; she tells herself she wasn’t counting on her not to.

Barry Derouen sighs on the other line. She can’t tell by the sound of it whether he’s going to report Saskia for sharing what she shouldn’t have.

“The proper authorities are handling the case, Miss Roscoe. I can tell you the person responsible isn’t going to be hurting anyone else anytime soon, okay? If you have more questions you’re going to have to come in person and ask them.”

Freddie puts on a show of being very reluctant to hang up, but she knows she’s gotten all from them that she can feasibly get. She calls the New Orleans Police Department and asks for Detective Philant Derouen. She considers giving Barry Derouen a chance to call the detective first, but the possibility that he could speak to Will Graham and Jack Crawford beforehand and discredit her story is enough incentive to make the call immediately.

Philant Derouen has a deep voice just like the other Derouen. They’re probably related by blood, though she can’t guess how closely.

“Miss Roscoe,” he addresses her in a formal tone after her call has been redirected to his desk. “What can I do for Baltimore today?”

She doesn’t let the identification of the area code rattle her, not on the outside. Her voice only shakes because it fits the act of worried friend. That’s the only reason.

“Well, I just got off the phone with Interim LSU. Barry Derouen—I think that was his name?—he told me to call the station and ask for you.” It’s lucky she called the hospital first and found out he called himself Barry and not Bartholomew. “My friend’s been shot and apparently there isn’t even an investigation taking place? Obviously I can’t just go and see him, or I would but—money’s tight right now. It’ll be a while before I can get a ticket to fly out there and my car…and God, we’ve all been wondering where the hell Will had gone and now this…I can’t…”

“Ma’am, ma’am,” he placates her.

She quickly checks Google Maps as he interrupts her.

“It’s a _sixteen_ hour drive to New Orleans from Baltimore, did you know that? _Sixteen hours,_ Detective. I have to work, and I don’t know the first thing—what if something’s happened to him since he got himself shot? What if he hurt himself or someone else while he was down there? How did he even _get_ to Louisiana?”

Something like a strangled sob fights its way out of her. It can happen sometimes if she gets far enough into character. Tears well up in her eyes and she doesn’t fight them, but she doesn’t let him hear her sniffle in case it sounds too far steeped in histrionics to sound genuine.

“Miss Roscoe, how did you know to look for him here?”

_Easy peasy._

“He grew up in Metairie. I’ve been contacting every hospital within ten miles.” Quieter she adds, “The morgues, too.” Her voice breaks. “I’ve asked them all to check the morgues just in case…just in case he…”

“Ma’am, the person responsible has been apprehended.” His voice is soft like he believes her or at least wants to. “It’s still an ongoing investigation, so I can’t tell you much else about it, but he’s in good hands.”

“Just…he didn’t have anything to do with those murders, did he? La Croix…” She pretends not to be able to say _Tueur._

He doesn’t say it for her, but he knows what she’s talking about. He says those responsible have been caught and put away. That much she knows already, thank you, Detective.

“I worried he might have been one of the victims before I got the idea to call around the hospitals. The press wouldn’t release the names, no one would tell me anything and I saw the FBI had gotten involved; I was just scared for him…”

“I understand that, Miss Roscoe.”

She wishes he would stop saying her name like it’ll calm her down.

“My mind has just been running wild on me, thinking about all the horrible things that could have happened down there while he’s been away; there was that…lightning storm and the murders and now I find out he’s been shot.”

“You said he lived with you in Baltimore?”

“Not with me, but in Baltimore, yes. He’s been missing for nearly a month.”

“Did you file a missing person’s report?”

“No, not after the last time.” She sighs. “He wanders off sometimes. No one takes it seriously when he does anymore, but I had a bad feeling.” She squirms in her chair, the statement not entirely untrue. “He usually just comes back when he’s ready, but I was afraid he wouldn’t this time.”

There’s some crackling silence between them, and Freddie decides to take a chance. It’s not as if it can really backfire on her. She’s only asking questions, only making calls.

“Was it Lottie Tasse?”

“Ma’am,” he warns.

“I just can’t believe anyone would shoot Will for nothing. He could have been trying to save someone else and that’s how he got hurt; I can believe that. I just need to know what happened.”

Some part of what she’s said sticks with him, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t point out that she’s grasping at straws; maybe because he understands that brand of desperation by now.

“But why would he have been at the police station unless you thought…he was a suspect?”

Or consulting with the FBI.

With a great deal of trepidation she asks, “Was Will a suspect? Did he do something that made him look guilty?”

At the panicked tone her voice takes on, he speaks up again. He tells her, somewhat exasperatedly, “No, Miss Roscoe, Will Graham was never a suspect.”

“Well, then _why_ was he at the police station? I just can’t see it; why weren’t you protecting him if he was there right under your nose? He needs help, Detective!”

There’s another beat of silence.

He says, “I’m going to give you Jack Crawford’s number, he’s the head of the Behavioral Unit at the FBI in Quantico. He knows more about your friend than I do. He can tell you more about what’s happened, all right?”

_There it is._

“Thank you,” she says almost as a question.

“It’s not what you’re expecting, Miss Roscoe, but I stand by what I said before. He’s in good hands. You don’t need to worry about that.”

She doesn’t, not in the slightest, though something nagging at the back of her mind makes her doubt what he’s said.

“I’m sorry to stir up so much trouble,” she says, not meaning it.

“It’s no more than what we’ve been dealing with over here for the past few weeks.”

He’s quick about getting the line free again now that her inquiries have ceased at last. She doesn’t bother taking down Jack’s information. She has his business card tucked away in a drawer somewhere. He would recognize her voice anyway, so she doesn’t want to bother with the task of calling him up.

Before starting anything else she goes back to Will Graham’s files and sees the blank psych evaluation form attached. Only Dr. Alana Bloom’s looping signature has been provided in lieu of an actual physical report.

Taking that for the dead end that it is, she opens a new word document and types, _If Angels Really Could Fall from Heaven_ at the top of the blank page.

She writes about Lécuyer’s statements, how he was so nearly arrested for another person’s crimes and how it was as if an angel had come down to save him from the clutches of the FBI. It reads a bit like noir fiction, her retelling of Crawford’s search for La Croix Tueur. She doesn’t mention the Derouens or Saskia Ingram in the article.

It’s rough when she finishes, but it makes more sense than half the stories she can find on the topic anywhere in the Times Picayune. She reads through it several more times before scavenging photos of Interim LSU and the NOPD online for the article. She even includes the photo of Cyril Lécuyer from one of the articles interviewing him. She’s careful to cite the proper owners of every picture she uses. Trust Jack Crawford to coerce her into removing it because of copyright violations.

She links back to the Times Picayune and emails the unformatted draft to the editor-in-chief. For herself, she posts the polished story on her blog and closes her laptop, satisfied. By now Jack Crawford will know that the secret of Will Graham is out, whoever’s secret it was in the first place. She isn’t quite sure what they would have been concealing his identity for, but she does know that if she had been affected by La Croix Tueur, she would want to know who it was that had caught the real killer and not put an innocent man away in her place.

If she were Cyril Lécuyer she would want to know who it was that had cleared her name.

It’s very interesting that the man truly seemed to come out of nowhere; it’s even more curious that no one had claimed him. The off-the-record evaluation with Bloom raises some alarm bells if only to signal to her that Crawford definitely will be bringing this man back with him to Quantico, maybe even to Baltimore.

Work had brought him to Maryland before, or she should say the Chesapeake Ripper had brought him to Maryland.

If he had just been some local man wandering and getting himself struck by lightning (because how else could the lesions paired with electrocution be explained?), they would have just left the matter with the doctors of Interim LSU.

But they pulled the fed card. Jack pulled the fed card.

There was something about Will Graham they didn’t want the public to see yet. They’d bowdlerized their official statements for the sake of damage control, but there’s no containing a flood or a hurricane.

And Will Graham, apparently, came in with the lightning. He is a force of nature, Freddie can tell.

No one rises out of obscurity into bullets and cosmic events to be ordinary or trite or _normal._ No one manages an entrance like that only to fade into the background, which is why the story needs to be told now. People deserve to see the change coming before it hits, and for some reason, she’s sure it’ll hit soon. She’s sure they’re protecting Will Graham for the wrong reasons; sure that he does need to be safeguarded but not from her or from the ones he’s saved so far.

There’s someone out there who will hurt him. There has to be or Jack wouldn’t be trying so hard to cover their tracks; he wouldn’t have conspired with the police chief not to name him. He wouldn’t have gone out of his way to remove several of the articles that had been published earlier on in the investigation.

Maybe some of them named Will Graham as the consultant and once he was shot, Jack decided anonymity would be better. She’s certain one of those articles must have had something implicating Will Graham’s involvement in the case, and the thought that she wouldn’t have had to go digging through the hospital’s database to just get his name if she had paid attention to it before today is highly irritating.

But then, it had been nice to refresh her memory as to the tricks Wendell had shown her back at Towson. And by nice she means horrendously frustrating and tedious.

She puts on a scarf and a jacket and heads outside with her keys and her purse to get lunch, content with the way her morning has played out. A message alert pings in on her phone as she’s taking a right turn down Aliceanna Street. She doesn’t go to check it until she’s parked. Wendell sent her a text.

_I just got a really creepy, foreboding call from that Crawford guy trying to get your number. You’re not internet stalking him again, are you?_

She feels light enough to smirk at the tone of voice she imagines him using and types back, _He doesn’t own Louisiana just bc he caught a case in NOLA. You need to chnge your number Wendell. Its called evolution. Everyone’s doing it._

Freddie gets out of the car and steps into the blustery cold wind. She checks the updated stats for the blog as she’s walking into Liquid Earth and finds the counter has moved up from zero to one since she left her apartment.

She coos at the screen, “You are an avid reader, aren’t you?”

It’s warm inside, so she takes off her scarf and unbuttons her jacket. It’s as she’s sitting down with a powerhouse sandwich and apple lemonade that the email comes in from Michelle Parmentier, the editor-in-chief of the Times Picayune.

She writes to regretfully inform Freddie that her lack of credited sources makes her article unfit to be published. She signs it _sincerely_ and _professionally_ , and all that other garbage that Freddie’s heard before.

She swallows down the familiar ache of disappointment and brings up Wendell’s contact information.

“What are you doing tonight?”

He’s not doing anything, and why.

“Oh, you know.”

Wendell, because they’ve been here before a hundred times, really does know.

“Hey, Roscoe,” he says gently.

“I don’t know why you call me that. I’m not going to marry you, and that name’s never going to be mine.”

And they’ve been here, too, just as many times is not more. He doesn’t even get upset, not the way he used to when she would tell him that.

“You know why I call you that.” His voice, a soft type of voice anyway and not very deep, is gentle. “You want me to come over tonight?”

“No.”

She nearly hangs up on him, angry at herself for calling him in a moment of weakness and livid to think that rejection could still sting her after everything.

“What if I bring the Rocky Horror Picture Show and eat really unhealthy snacks while you judge me?”

And this, maybe, is part of the reason she has always let him call her Roscoe without too much protestation.

She taps her fingers on the unopened bag of potato chips and frowns.

“And candy corn,” she says finally, deciding that if anyone’s going to criticize her for keeping company with anyone tonight it won’t be Wendell, and at least there’s safety in that.

“And candy corn,” he agrees without any hesitation at all. “All the candy corn you want and all the licorice you don’t.”

“You’re disgusting,” she says tonelessly, though a small smile wants to be born there on her lips.

“You love me.”

Well, shit.

But she’s smiling now and he can’t see her, so it’s not like any of it matters.

A little bit more sternly, she says, “Don’t press your luck.”

“I’ll see you, _Fredericka._ ”

Her mouth twists into a frown, and he must know because only her mother calls her that. He laughs good-naturedly on the other line, as simple and kind as a person could be.

“I’ll text you.”

“You’re going to catch a whopper one of these days, Roscoe,” he says, almost out of nowhere. He’s warm and sweet, and she’s never deserved it. “I just know you’ll get something big. You know you deserve it.”

And no, her heart doesn’t clench at that because she _knows_ as much; _knows_ that she’s more than earned it all this time that people have looked down their noses at her and hated her for seeking out the truth where no one else would risk their comfort just to ask a question.

But her voice is small and tight when she replies, “Yeah, thanks, Wendell.”

She sets her phone down when he hangs up and drags the screen around aimlessly. The hit count has crawled up to fourteen.

She clicks the screen off and tucks the phone away into her jacket pocket.

_An avid reader, right._

Like that would do her any good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The “avid reader” bit is from Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, but in Harris’ _Red Dragon_ , Dolarhyde signs his letters to Lecter as “your Avid Fan,” so that’s where that comes from.
> 
> Also, Freddy Lounds dates a woman named Wendy who calls him Roscoe in _Red Dragon._


	10. Hurt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone wants a piece of Will Graham.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Beneath the stains of time/The feelings disappear/You are someone else/I am still right here_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> The devil cannot see our inner thoughts. And again in the same place: Not all our evil thoughts are from the devil, but sometimes they arise from our own choice. Besides, love and hatred are a matter of the will, which is rooted in the soul; therefore they cannot by any cunning be caused by the devil.  
> —from Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, Part I, Question VII

“So he’s calling himself Will Graham now?”

Hannibal paces in her sitting room, a mess if she ever saw one. He had been alarmingly devastated that the articles leaking his name had been removed from the Times-Picayune, and now that Freddie Lounds’ blog had created a hot topic out of the man Hannibal had become inconsolable.

“Yes,” he mutters, stopping by the window to stand.

“And you’re _certain_?”

“Would I come to you with this information if I doubted?”

She rolls her eyes, memory taking her back to Valais where she had first met the famed Ose. In that time he had walked as a man called Petrus Varisyn and he had burned at the stake for witchcraft. As long as she has known him he has always been demanding about the things he wants; objects he would like to possess.

It really isn’t surprising in the slightest that he’s found himself most desirous of an angel, even a fallen one.

“I don’t trust your judgment where Mal’ak ha-mashḥit is concerned.”

He turns on her, face empty of emotion and eyes burning like the flames that killed him the day they met. But his eyes always held hellfire within them, for anyone foolish enough to look close enough. Bedelia could see it, and so had Mal’ak ha-mashḥit, all those years ago.

Bedelia returns his muted glare. In attempt to remind him of who he is, she names him as he is when she says, “You’re obsession will be your death, _Ose._ ”

“I have died a thousand deaths,” he snaps. “Yet I have lived only once.”

She laughs, surprised and experiencing something else much more complicated in the very hollow space within her chest; perhaps pity. He doesn’t move from the window but he turns his face away from her to look outside. His reflection in the glass is his own, the face he wore on his ascent from the pit to the murky jungles of Tenochtitlan; it’s the face that warped and twisted in bodily agony when the flames licked higher and higher into the smoke blackened evening sky nearly six hundred years ago.

“You’ve been very busy,” she muses flatly, moving to stand beside him.

Her own face twists into view, exposed in the reflection to his eyes as much as it would his. He flicks his eyes toward her reflection and then back to his. The face in the reflection becomes that of Hannibal Lecter again.

He murmurs, more to the window than to her, “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

“Poignant.” She gives him a hard look and then turns back to the sunny day beyond the glass. “Have they released a photo of your darling dear?”

“No.”

Dismissively she says, “Well, then I suppose you had better not worry about it until they do.”

“Jack Crawford means to bring him from Louisiana. If he retains any of his divinity by then, it may spell damnation for both of us.”

“For you, maybe,” she growls. “I have no intention of provoking the first being to have any hope of besting me in a hundred years.”

“Ninety, Barbas,” Hannibal chides, raising one eyebrow when she turns to sneer at him.

“The Great Kantō earthquake was not something either of us could have predicted, nor was the subsequent slaughter that followed in its aftermath something we could have combatted on such short notice. A mob mentality is not a corporal being as Mal’ak ha-mashḥit is a corporal being.”

“The body collapsed in the road after the first wave of ethnic cleansing subsided was a corporal being—yours, in fact.”

Seething she spits at him, “You act as if I had not pulled you from enough corpses by then to merit reciprocation.”

“ _You_ act as if I had inconvenienced you. By all means, let me die the next time it happens.”

“It shouldn’t happen at all! You are Ose.” She manhandles him away from the window so he won’t be able to avoid her eyes that way. He just sighs and turns to make for the foyer. “Do you have any idea what your name used to mean to the rest of us? You _crawled_ out of hell. You lived among them with a different face every night, you left _no_ bodies in your wake, and no man could ever tell he hadn’t been quite himself in the time that you kept him for a disguise.”

He stops to gather his coat and makes a show of getting his arms into it.

“The world changes every day, Barbas.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she mutters bitterly. “The old ruins still stand; the old languages still carry music for those with the skill to speak them. The world is the same place it has always been; _you’ve_ changed.”

“Do you think you haven’t?”

“I know what I am, just like I know that this life here is temporary; that all life is temporary.” She raises a hand when he goes to speak. “And for us, death, too, is temporary.”

“A perfect cycle of life and death,” he muses with a false smile. “How very droll.”

“Don’t try to talk circles around me, Hannibal.” And he so clearly _is_ just a man with his earthly cravings and persistent immaturity. “This Will Graham, if he is the same one you knew in Tenochtitlan, there is no claiming him for yourself in this lifetime. You had your chance, you were cheated, and life continued as it always will.” Trying to be gentle with him, for whatever purpose that will serve, she adds, “He bestowed life upon you that wasn’t his to give and certainly wasn’t yours to take.”

“He can give me everything now; whatever he has left.”

There’s no reasoning with him. She hadn’t expected he would listen anyway, but it’s disheartening all the same that he proves her right. Bedelia has not lived a thousand years on this earth to seek death out via increasingly violent, creative means. She had not pulled the charred remains of his old corpse in Valais from the pile of the dead so that he might seek it either.

She didn’t see it then. She hadn’t wanted to.

When he leaves she stands by the window for a spell, dreaming with her eyes on the few wintry clouds speckling the sky. He never liked to tell her anything about his past lives from before they met. Sometimes, if they had found themselves contained within a terrestrial purgatory, he would slip and mention paradise as he knew it. He would mention the name she had hated from the first revelation.

Ose, a former president of hell and ruler of legions, had fallen when the angel was sent down—more than half a century before the latter had truly been cast down. It was a disgrace, but no one had ever known of it. There had been talk of an angel, also nameless in the beginning, and mentions of a star-crossed union. There were rumors it had been God-ordained, but to speak of it was blasphemy whether one wore wings or whether he wore a face of smoke and ash beneath the one of flesh and melanin.

It’s absurd that she should be curious, but the mystery of this romance, however legitimately Hannibal ever desired the fallen one, has gnawed at her for centuries.

She takes out her tablet and goes digging through Lounds’ blog and the Times-Picayune. There is still no photo to lend a face to the name, but the name in question has been supplied anew. More information about the man’s involvement in the case had since come to light; the injury he sustained protecting a self-proclaimed murderer, his withering condition in the hospital, and his active role as Special Investigator in the case. She finds herself frowning at the phrase _withering condition_.

If he had in fact touched ground only a short time ago, then it shouldn’t tax him to heal at an elevated rate.

_That explains the previous redactions._

A non-human hounded by a human media storm needs to act as human as possible. Hannibal must be ripping his hair out at the irony. Jack Crawford must be mad as hell. Bedelia assumes he must know what Will is; how else would he have snatched him up so quickly for his cause unless he and his team had been the ones to discover him?

She wishes she could have seen it; the traditional way to refer to the lightning storms that wrought disgraced angels was ḫa-lam Supad: _the Shepherd is lost._

It had always been more of a celebratory exclamation than an actual title. Later, the event became known only as Ḫa-lam, and “ḫa-lam” itself became a derogatory word among their kind; among the angels and the demons alike.

In the old days there would be a hunt in the wake of Ḫa-lam, an expedition to see who would claim the abandoned Child’s head. There was great sport in it. Any time one of them fell anywhere Hannibal was the first to go running, the first to inquire as to the name or names. He would lose himself in the chase and he would venture after the prize with so much vitality that she had been surprised to discover he had it in him after decades of listless inactivity.

She hadn’t seen it because she hadn’t wanted to see it.

Hannibal doesn’t speak to her again until a few days later when something new has graced the likes of TattleCrime.com. She goes to look anyway, though she is still annoyed with him and would like nothing more than to wring the neck of the man called Will Graham just to be done with it all.

There are a few things running through her mind as she scans the latest update on Freddie Lounds’ blog. The first thought she really has is that quite a few people have already got their hooks in Will Graham, tugging him a number of ways for their own selfish—and sometimes less so—devices. Hannibal hasn’t even had the pleasure of seeing him in the flesh yet, and he already has his claws firmly implanted in the man’s heart.

But there are claws in Hannibal’s heart, too, in whatever soft part of him exists that allows him to hunger for things he should not be capable of desiring. They deserve each other; the damned one and the rejected one. After all, they are both only men anymore.

The article presents a few more facts transferred over from the Times-Picayune and a few completely new theories as to the man’s true identity and the nature of his work with Jack Crawford. It’s all hilarious, paranoid conjecture, of course. The truth is too fantastic to print; she doubts Freddie Lounds has any idea.

There is one facet of the article that does spark her interest at the bottom of the page: a photograph of a man lying in a hospital bed with oxygen tubing stuck to his face. His eyes are closed, and he looks, for all intents and purposes, to be in a withering condition. She can’t say just by looking how much of it is fabricated and how much of it is real. She sends Hannibal a text asking if the man is the same one he knew in Mexico. He tells her it is, so she calls him.

“We should leave, before we are detected.”

“I have no intention of leaving.”

She grits her teeth. “What are you going to do then?”

“Go about my business, as usual.”

It’s in his voice, the excited beating of his body’s heart; the almost breathless declaration teasing of an ancient chase restarting after too long of a wait. She can hear that he will not be convinced of changing his course.

“I caught him once,” he says calmly.

“He was the one to catch you, Hannibal.” She shakes her head. “You were possessed of him from the moment he was snatched from you.”

“No one else has taken possession of me since.”

She thinks if she were the type to be sentimental that statement would sting, but she had only ever revived him in the past out of some misplaced sense of idolatry. He had been so great once, but perhaps in all the time that she had walked alongside him, over seas and deserts and cities, he hadn’t been who she thought he was.

He says, through the fog of memories, “If you wish to leave, you may.”

She sighs, the decision made already. They are quiet for a few seconds more until he speaks again.

“I will send you off then.”

“Come early for your appointment this week. There is a patient I have who will fill the necessary role.”

He agrees. How the afternoon proceeds is entirely up to her then. Bedelia rearranges her schedule so that Hannibal will be her final patient and purchases a plane ticket for the same day. She sits down with her penultimate patient nearly a week later. Her senses are attuned to every shift in the air, alerting to Hannibal’s presence the exact moment his car pulls up in the parking lot.

“Have you spoken to your sister since the incident, Isaac?”

He fidgets in his seat, tugging on his sleeve and keeping his eyes focused out the window. Isaac’s meetings with her are court mandated. Well in his thirties now, his childhood had been particularly traumatic. After months of coaxing and waiting him out he finally confessed to the charges of which he’d been accused. The complete story of his life is a mess of guilt, abused trust, and confused allegiances. His death would be a mercy. She had suspected he wanted to do harm to her several times. Given his history it’s quite impressive he has demonstrated so much restraint thus far.

She feels only a slight tug of guilt for tipping the scales against him the way she plans on doing as soon as he buckles under the pressure of her gaze and returns her eyes. When he does he will see her true face.

“Ally doesn’t…she doesn’t want anything to do with me…after…” He scrubs a hand across his eyes and then down one side of his face. His voice quavers. “After I…”

“After you nearly beat her fiancé to death with a crowbar,” she fills in for him.

He shouts at his feet, “He was hurting her! I _know_ he was hurting her.”

“She told the police and the judge in your case that you made it all up, Isaac; she posited that you were obsessed with her.”

His eyes fly up to hers, the emotions changing rapidly from hateful rage to frightened confusion to outright terror.

“What’s…what’s wrong with your…” He scrambles out of his chair and backs away toward the window. “Dr. Du Maurier, your face…”

She stands and approaches him, careful not to advance too quickly.

“He was in a coma for three years because of what you did to him, Isaac.”

“I…no, he…He was bad, I had to…”

He lurches toward her desk for a weapon but only succeeds in knocking half the things on top of it to the floor. He whirls around on her, and desperate, throws himself at her, hands tight and bruising around her throat.

“You’re not going to kill me,” he screams, spitting on her as they crash into a bookcase and crash into a heap on the floor. She struggles only because the consciousness beneath hers is of a wild survival instinct and will not remain still in the face of death. “You’re not going to do it; I won’t let you!”

The door to the office opens, and her face flickers from demonic shadow to the strangled red of a human gasping for breath, for life. She can already feel the edges coming back where they had rounded from years of gentle submission. It will be easier to leave now, with the violence and the terrified screaming reminding her so readily of home.

Hannibal is crouched over Isaac on the floor. He resembles the leopard stalking toward its prey, shoulders working beneath his jacket and elbows bent with whatever it is he’s doing. She thinks it’s fitting that the last time she sees him will be like this; Ose as the leopard, Ose as the creature of hell that he is.

Isaac gurgles and convulses from his spot on the floor, but he does not try to stand or flee. He doesn’t speak or scream. She suspects he can’t.

Hannibal folds the man’s jerking arm across his chest, fingers clenching sporadically around the bloody handle of a pair of stainless steel scissors. With one gloved hand over Isaac’s wrist and one over his elbow, he holds the point over Isaac’s jugular vein and waits for a spasm powerful enough to push the scissors through his skin. Isaac suffocates before that can happen.

Hannibal rises and comes to crouch by her side.

“Are you still here,” he teases, turning her face one way and then the other in his hand. The gloves are dry. She anticipated as much.

“I wanted to see you in action again, for old times’ sake.”

“That would imply that we have had good times together.”

“It wasn’t all fire and brimstone, was it,” she murmurs, surprising both of them. Her lips twitch up and so do his. “If you require that I return, for any reason,” she intones, searching his eyes, “kindly go to hell.”

He laughs. A promise exists somewhere within the sound of it.

“Goodbye, Barbas.”

“Auf Wiedersehen, Ose.”

She closes her eyes, his hand coming to rest over her forehead. They’ve done this for each other before. There hadn’t always been time, as with the case of the great quake in Yokohama or several instances of the occasional execution for accused witchcraft, necromancy, lycanthropy, or cannibalism. It’s nicer when it happens this way, of course; it’s pleasant, like falling asleep.

When she’s out, she lingers in the room a while to watch Hannibal manage the woman left behind in a catatonic state. She watches him take his fingers across her forehead, gloves now removed. He brushes her ruffled hair out of her eyes.

“I’m sorry. I heard the noise from outside. I had to be sure you were all right. Can you hear me? Dr. Du Maurier?”

“Hannibal,” the human woman murmurs in the voice that has been Barbas’ for so long. “Hannibal, what…Oh, God, Isaac,” she breathes, sitting up abruptly and looking immediately to the lifeless body of Isaac Miggs with something like distraught panic. “I need…we have to call the police, Hannibal.”

Barbas waits a moment longer until Hannibal raises his eyes to the corner of the room where she stands veiled from Bedelia Du Maurier’s eyes but not from Hannibal’s, from Ose’s. He nods, almost imperceptibly, and helps Bedelia to her feet as Barbas fades and decompresses herself into something small and inconsequential, a fly. She goes out the window when Hannibal opens it under the pretense of letting air into the room that has already begun to stink of death.

As she’s stretching her wings into those of a butterfly and preparing to take off, he whispers, “You know where to find me, sister.”

And she tells him, in that capacity they have constructed that allows them to speak to each other without words or gestures but with intentions and truth, _Get busy living, brother._

He laughs softly, and she flutters away, catching the cold wind as it blows and taking on the shapes of a sparrow and then a Black Kite. It takes a few hours in the air and a meal of three mice, but she makes it to the sanitarium where she knows a certain doctor works. She worms her way through the building’s defenses and overtakes him easily; all it really takes is one weak spot. She goes in through his ear, before he can do anything about it.

Maybe it’s a testament to the way Frederick Chilton runs this place that no one questions him when he walks right out the front door. Barbas is quite entertained. She laughs when she gets out to the parking lot and clicks the unlock button on his keys. She follows the sound of the horn and takes the car to the airport.

She would reprimand Ose for a move as reckless as this, but she had planned her entrance and exit strategies both. The flight is nearly six hours long. Night has fallen by the time the plane lands in New Orleans.

Chilton’s body is so very perfect for short term possession. He kicks around a little in his confusion, but he relinquishes his fight early on, prepared to settle in for the long haul. She admires the type of resignation she gets from him, that it isn’t out of fear or weakness that he doesn’t struggle. He’s curled up beneath the biting static of her presence in and around his mind trying to understand it.

His dangerous inclination for discovery will get him eviscerated one day. It is the downfall of all those who expose what does not belong to them that they will be turned inside out when the Judgment day comes. She wonders about Freddie Lounds as she’s depositing his body into a motel.

Chilton stays asleep, obedience called by the strings she keeps tied around his subconscious. While he worked as a convenient enough means of travel, he will not be welcomed readily into Will Graham’s room.

Barbas works her way through the streets, running through the shadows and the trodden slush first as an alley cat and then as a dog and then as a drunk hobbling on and off the sidewalk. She pitches over to one side into the street when headlights flash behind her. The beleaguered body tumbles over the hood of the car, cracks the windshield, and nosedives into the road. The car speeds away, but a rattled witness calls an ambulance.

The ambulance takes her to Interim LSU.

She waits out the ride to the hospital and waits out the initial flurry of hands and IVs and monitor readings. The first nurse she gets alone, much later into the night if not morning already, is younger and blonde just like Bedelia Du Maurier.

The drunkard passed out on the uncomfortable cot shivers and moans quietly when she leaves him. His broken ribs and collar bone sting him in her absence.

The nurse, nametag helpfully reading _Saskia_ , fights like hell to get Barbas out. She would expect that kind of response here in the Crescent City, though she discovers straight away that the woman’s vigorous attempts at emancipation were crafted farther East in the likes of rural New York. She enjoys that a bit more, really; the influx of memories learning to drive a tractor the same year she brought home her first boyfriend, memories of the woman’s parents, memories of leaving them behind to go to medical school and become a doctor.

“I love a girl with a fighting spirit,” she murmurs to herself as she walks out from behind the curtain and makes for the nurse’s station in the atrium of the—she looks—third floor.

She types in the name Will Graham and scans the room number and the scheduled rounds each nurse is to make up to the room, probably still guarded by at least a preliminary detail if not Jack Crawford himself. A man named Bartholomew has the last slot tonight. Barbas takes the cell phone from her pocket and looks for a _Bartholomew_ in the woman’s contacts. She finds one _Barry_ and opens a blank text message.

 _Can you take Verger tonight?_ Saskia was scheduled to visit him at the same time Barry is supposed to visit Will Graham. _He always says the most bizarre stuff to me._

There are memories of that, too: Mason Verger’s head wrapped in cloth bandages and his arm broken in three places on the fifth floor, his hulking sister looking on in silent hatred, and Mason Verger telling Saskia in a rasping whisper, _My sister used to look just like you._

She hadn’t told Barry or anyone that it was happening. Barbas takes personal offense to the secret, to the power it enables Mason Verger to have over her.

Barry texts her back, perhaps having some idea of what she means, _Yeah, can you take Graham then?_

_Sure._

As she’s making her way to the elevator he sends her another text: _I can talk to Archambault about assigning him someone else if he makes you uncomfortable._

Barbas answers the way Saskia would, though it irritates her to do so: _I can take care of it myself, Barry. I just don’t feel like dealing with him tonight._

She steps out of the elevator and adds, _But thank you._

_I live to serve._

There are actually no guards waiting outside Will Graham’s room. There is one person at his bedside sleeping with her arms folded on the thin mattress and another with his head resting against the wall in a chair nearest to the door. She makes quick work of the task at hand, checking and marking his progress. The man is not _withering_ ; rather he’s robust with a steady pulse and no lesions anywhere but for a healed over scar at the center of his chest. He doesn’t stir when she checks him, accustomed to this type of necessary, clinical touch and not expecting foul play.

His morphine drip is also quite high, which suggests he is either in a great deal of pain, or he is being given a placebo drug in place of morphine so that he will only have the appearance of being in tremendous physical pain. It’s quite the extended charade, but it’s perfectly executed. Finished, she takes the phone from her pocket again and takes a clear snapshot of him from the foot of the bed where his chart hangs unassumingly.

“Is it standard protocol to take pictures of your patients?”

She snaps one more photo when he opens his eyes, blue-green like a murky sea. The photo stills and preserves in the phones memory before his expression can change from bleary bewilderment to stunned panic.

He is a mouse looking up at a grinning feline, after all. He knows his place.

“Ḫa-lam,” he whispers, eyes wide and flicking from her face to the woman sleeping at his side.

Barbas whispers back, “Hush now.” She slips her hand into her pocket for the scalpel she nicked from one of the surgical trays downstairs and raises it to Saskia’s neck. “Don’t you move, Destroyer.”

His jaw is set tight but in an emotion less like fear and more like concern. He thinks she’s come to slaughter him in the name of Ḫa-lam. In light of tradition, he can’t figure out why she would threaten the life of her host rather than just kill him and be done with it.

Voice lighter than the rustle of the blanket falling away as he sits up, she asks, “Why were you cast out?”

“I…” He frowns, eyebrows furrowing. Something falls over his face, a kind of shadow she would fear if he hadn’t been reduced to a measly human man. “I disobeyed orders.”

“That’s always the reason you give,” she says, meaning _angels_ when she says _you_. He flinches at the implication; flinches because she’s just admitted to killing others like him for sport. “Give me a better reason.”

“I f-fell for the wrong…person,” he confesses with clenched teeth and flared nostrils as if admitting it hurts him. Maybe it does. He hisses, “Is _that_ what you want to hear?”

The dark-haired woman stirs at his tone but doesn’t wake. He gives her a desperate glance.

“Will you please put that away,” he mumbles, eyes locked on the scalpel in her hands. “We both know you could kill her without the use of an extraneous weapon.”

She tucks the scalpel back into her pocket and comes around to the side of his bed not occupied by a visitor.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Barbas,” he says.

The old name carries a strange ring when it isn’t said by Ose, by any of the forms he manipulates. There is always a hint of his voice regardless of whose body he uses. Mal’ak ha-mashḥit is a stranger, but she knows him; has a detailed history of him as seen through Ose’s eyes; has a soft kind of affection interspersed with scornful enmity for the creature of sunlight and intuition.

She leans in closer and breathes, “Ose lives.”

Several quaint emotions dance over his features: shock, confusion, denial, hope, and fear. He looks angry in the next instant and grits out, “Liar.”

She hums, feigning displeasure at the name she wears over her heart like a badge of honor. “I would never,” she murmurs, taking out the phone in her pocket again. “Smile for your sweetheart, Will Graham.”

The first photo has his eyes trained on her, rage clearly written into his features. The second finds him looking wonderingly into the camera. While it isn’t anything so outright as a smile, she figures it’s the best she’s going to get for her troubles. She stands and makes for the door, sending the photos she has snapped to Chilton’s phone and deleting both the photos and the text messages after the fact.

“He becomes like a child at the very thought of you,” she muses with her fingers slipping around the door handle. “He’ll be ecstatic to see the sentiment returned.”

“Wait.” He starts to fold the blanket back but stops when he sees her patting the pocket where the scalpel rests. “How…” He falters for a moment before steeling himself. “Where can I find him?”

“Not so fast, dumu Aĝ.”

_Child of Heaven._

He winces at the title he can’t claim anymore.

“Please,” he starts to say, but she raises her hand to stop him.

“Have faith that he will find you.” It is a warning and a threat, but she can see that he takes it for a promise. “You remember faith, don’t you?”

He is silent, eyes mournful as he watches her go. As soon as she is out the door she walks Saskia down the ground floor, rids herself of the scalpel at hand, and trades bodies with someone in the waiting room complaining of a sprained ankle. She watches Saskia blink and frown to herself as she goes, making sure she will not cause problems for either of them.

She walks outside, the brisk winter night lovely and cool, even with the minor sting of the injured ankle. Once she is close enough to the motel, she ditches the host in favor of entering the opened bathroom window in the guise of a bird.

Chilton is fast asleep where she left him, sprawled across the bottom half of the bed with his shoes and jacket still on. The room key hangs from between his fingers. She takes the phone from his pocket once their bodies are one and the same again and sends the photos to Hannibal. Immediately after they go through she texts him, _I didn’t harm a hair on his head._

Hannibal calls the number he no doubt recognizes and is understandably outraged.

“What in the hell were you thinking going after him?”

“Listen to you,” she chides him in Chilton’s fond, musical sort of drawl. “I _said_ I didn’t harm him.”

Calmly but with his temper still flaring beneath, he asks, “Were you discovered?”

“Oh, yes, but not as your darling drinking buddy, Dr. Chilton, no.” Vaguely, a residual pride wells in her chest; she rolls her eyes. “I’m more careful than that, Hannibal; don’t you know me by now?”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. She suspects he’s taken to scrolling through the stolen photos of Will Graham. She smirks at his predictability.

“I mean to bring Frederick home in the morning. You may pick him up at the airport if you wish; fabricate a story he will believe about some impromptu trip or other. I will be long gone by then.”

He remains silent, thoughtful in the spaces between the faint static ruffling over their connection. His voice is quiet when he voices his question: “What did you say to him?”

“I told him you were alive.” She pauses in case he goes to protest, but he does not. “I asked him why he was cast out.”

More silence.

“He said, and I quote, my sweet, foolish Ose: I fell for the wrong person.”

Hannibal clears his throat after a moment of stunned quiet. He says, “What time at the airport tomorrow?”

“Be there at noon.”

She feels him nodding through the phone.

“Barbas,” he says.

“You’re welcome, Ose.”

She disconnects the call and sets the alarm for the following morning. Frederick Chilton rests beneath her influence, struggling to remember even as his mind washes clean in the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Hurt” originally by Nine Inch Nails, written by Trent Reznor
> 
> Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger; translated by Rev. Montague Summers  
> http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/part-i-question-vii/
> 
> From Stephen King’s _Different Seasons_ : “Get busy living or get busy dying.”  
> (Also in Frank Darabont’s _Shawshank Redemption_ )
> 
> Emesal dialect  
> http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcslemesal.cgi

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics from Johnny Cash.


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